In each of my posts, I include book recommendations for each weekly theme. You can read details about all the books in the posts I list below. I’ve also gathered all the books together into a spreadsheet you can download here. I get most of my books from my local library, but you can also purchase from Amazon. If you’re going to purchase some from Amazon, please consider clicking on this affiliate link – then I get a small referral fee for anything you end up buying – at no cost to you – it helps support my work here.

Topics included in the spreadsheet:

• What is an Inventor?
• Simple Machines Unit: Overview of Simple Machines, Inclined Plane, Lever, Wedge, Screw, Wheel and Axle, Pulleys
• Machines: Cars
• Building: Towers, Bridges & Tunnels, If I Built a House, Contraptions and Rube Goldbergs

These are all books suitable for children age 3 – 7. They include

• non-fiction,
• a category I think of as “non-fiction ideas with a story-line” – in other words it reads more like a story, but everything in it is fact-based, and
• fiction – we read a lot of “flights of fancy” books in my class to inspire creativity and passion, as well as reading non-fiction to teach facts.

Back in February, I wrote a post about math literacy, where I described an app called Bedtime Math. I wanted to briefly re-visit that, and say: if you’re not using this app, you should be!

I’ve been using this app with my five year old for 5 months now.

It is now a part of his bedtime routine he looks forward to just as much as bedtime stories. He talks more about math throughout the day, hearkening back to last night’s bedtime math problems, just like he refers back to the bedtime story we read last night.

When we started, he could do the “wee ones” questions, sometimes needing hints. He now can do the wee ones and little kids levels pretty much on his own, and can do “big kids” with coaching through – he’s even engaged and following as I work out the “sky’s the limit” level. He easily adds and subtracts in his head now, and is starting to get the idea of multiplication.

So far, we’ve only done it verbally, doing the math in our heads, but we’re about to add a notebook and pencil to the bedside table, because sometimes writing out or drawing out one of the “big kids” or “sky’s the limit” questions will enable him to better follow what we’re doing.

I think the app is just fabulous for building math enthusiasm and math skills, and am glas to have found it!

Do you find that you now have an over-abundance of plastic Easter eggs and hard-boiled eggs in your house? Looking for ideas for what to do with them all?

Hard-Boiled Eggs;

• Try a science experiment to explain density: Put a hard-boiled egg in water. It sinks. Stir plenty of salt into the water – the egg floats. Learn the science.
• Try an engineering experiment – the great egg drop. How high of a height can you drop an egg from without cracking the shell? We did this experiment with plastic baggies filled with packing materials – learn more here. Search online for “egg drop challenge” and you’ll see all the other constructs folks have come up with.

Plastic Eggs:

• Engineering experiment: Build a water-tight “submarine.”
• Make egg shaker instruments for music time, word family eggs for literacy skills, color matching patterns for math skills: learn more here.
• Use them as snack containers in your child’s lunch box.

Any Eggs:

• Do more egg hunts! You’re not limited to one per year, I promise. You can do as many as you want, all year round. Learn what your child learns while hunting for eggs.
• Roll them down ramps, or try other “physics experiments.”

Here’s last year’s science themed Valentine Card – feel free to copy the image and use however you want.

I just set up a Facebook page for Inventors of Tomorrow. “Like” the page to follow my updates. I will post there every time I do a new blog entry.