Grades 2-3 - Orange Cluster
| Orange Cluster Anne Granick and Tracey Maye "Persevere. That’s what I always say to people. There’s no easy route."
-Lonnie Johnson, aerospace engineer & inventor of the Super Soaker toy |
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Orange Cluster’s theme this year is: Innovate and Create: Learning from Failure and Creative Inventors
In social studies, the children learn about a diverse group of inventors and their contributions to society. They will create a multi-media presentation of this information. They will even create an invention for a fairy tale character. Snow White needs a device to detect poison in apples and the Gingerbread Man needs unique transportation to get safely across the river. The students will tinker with a variety of objects including but not limited to cardboard tubes, paperclips, cotton balls, fabric, straws, and cotton swabs. Using these objects, they will create a model of their own invention. As real inventors do, the students will then write and turn in a patent to the Orange Cluster Patent Office.
In science, our inventors will also become engineers and experts in simple machines. In the engineering unit, they will learn about the engineering process: researching, brainstorming, developing ideas, building, testing and ultimately, improving their design. Using a variety of materals, they will build rovers, robotic arms, landers, and parachutes. In the simple machines unit, the students will experiment with levers, inclined planes, wedges, wheels and axles, pulleys and screws. They will then use this knowledge to build a Rube Goldberg contraption. A Rube Goldberg is a chain reaction machine intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an overly complicated way. The students will incorporate 4-5 simple machines in their Rube Goldberg that eventually turns on a light, puts toothpaste on a toothbrush or pops a balloon. All of this and more will be on display at our end of the year Invention Convention tentatively set for Thursday, June 4th so mark your calendars!
"Every person is born with a creative mind. Everyone has that ability."
- Mary Kenner, inventor who holds the record for the most U.S. patents awarded to a Black woman
"I think I’ve had more failures than successes, but I don’t see the failures as mistakes because I always learned something from those experiences. I see them as having not achieved the initial goal, nothing more than that."
- James West, inventor who holds more than 250 patents for the production and design of microphones
- Mary Kenner, inventor who holds the record for the most U.S. patents awarded to a Black woman
"I think I’ve had more failures than successes, but I don’t see the failures as mistakes because I always learned something from those experiences. I see them as having not achieved the initial goal, nothing more than that."
- James West, inventor who holds more than 250 patents for the production and design of microphones