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In this Read-Along lesson, twins Mimi and Lulu try different ways to catch a mysterious nighttime visitor…until they hit on just the right solution. The lesson includes a short exercise where students imagine how to design a good monster trap, and then pretend to be sneaky monsters. You can extend the lesson with the optional activity, Be an Inventor, where students draw their own inventions for machines that do chores.
Student slideshow: English | Spanish
Teacher printout: English & Spanish
Find the Inventions All Around Us: Ask your students to walk around the classroom and look for inventions. Talk about the inventions they find. Inventions in your classroom may include paper and pencils; tape, pushpins, and crayons; staplers and hole punches; electric lights and the switches that turn them on and off, and so on.
Make an invention box for your classroom. This article from Modern Parents/Messy Kids provides ideas for what to put in the box and some prompts for tasks that the inventions could accomplish.
Invent a Backscratcher: For a hands-on activity, check out this Teach Engineering activity, in which students use simple materials to invent a backscratcher.
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