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Saturday, March 2, 2013

Just Bag It!



We’ll share the story of Margaret E. Knight, the nineteenth century woman who figured out how to make a machine that could fold a flat-bottomed brown paper bag, then we’ll make wild and wonderful paper bag creations.

(Ages 5-10)

Program Plans:

Music: Free to Be, You and Me* (CD) --Marlo Thomas and Friends – played as children enter, again while doing craft later.


Display books: Biographies on inventors (especially female inventors), collective biographies 926.082’s, 609’s invention books – early arrivals browsed through these.

Read: In the Bag! Margaret Knight Wraps it Up – Monica Kulling, illus. by David Perkins (Alt: Marvelous Mattie: How Margaret E. Knight Became an Inventor by Emily Arnold McCully)

Flannelboard/Song (optional): “Parents are People" from above album

Craft: Make masks and puppets from brown bags. Google images for inspiration: "paper bag Saul Steinberg"
Supplies: brown paper bags (lunch and grocery sizes), markers, scissors, hole punchers, glue sticks, scotch tape, pipe cleaners and anything else desired for decoration
Table signs available (email me)

*Also available as DVD and segments on Youtube
3/2/2013

3/2017:

Book: In the Bag!: Margaret Knight Wraps it Up by Monica Kulling The true story of how a 19th century woman invented the machine that could make the paper bag we all take for granted and how a man tried to steal her patent!  (Common Core – can compare with Emily Arnold McCully’s equally excellent Marvelous Mattie: How Margaret E. Knight Became an Inventor. (both JBiog Knight) or Monica Kulling’s book about another facinating female industrial engineer Spic-and-Span: Lilian Gilbreth’s Wonder Kitchen – who invented a step-on trash can and shelves in the doors of our fridges!)  Want to learn more about women engineers?  Check out: www.engineergirl.org

“paper or plastic? – often at the store, your purchases are now put into a plastic bag instead -- paper bags decompose, but plastic lives forever and can cause real problems”

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Book: One Plastic Bag: Isatou Ceesay and the Recycling Women of the Gambia by Miranda Paul tells how plastic bag trash was becoming a terrible problem in a village – even killing the goats – until a clever and enterprising woman and her friends figured out how to take this trash and make it into useful purses that could be sold for income.  (Booktalked: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer – the autobiographical story of a boy from Malawi, who, when a drought threatened his village, used books found in a library to learn to build a windmill from scraps. http://carolsimonlevin.blogspot.com/2013/03/incredible-adventures-boy-who-harnessed.html – has more ideas for this title.
http://carolsimonlevin.blogspot.com/2015/04/school-age-storytime-earth-day-heroes.html – has more stories of environmental heroes.

“Here’s another kid who uses imagination and builds things from scraps…but unlike the other books we shared today, this one is fiction (not true)…”

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Book: Rosie Revere, Engineer by Andrea Beaty   Rosie loves to invent until an uncle laughs at her cheddar cheese hat, but her Great-Aunt Rose (a tribute to the “Rosie the Riviters” of WW2) convinces her that inventions that fail are not failures….your brilliant first flop was a raging success…come on, let’s get busy and on to the next!…The only true failure can come if you quit.”  Fun related book: Iggy Peck, Architect by Andrea Beaty (2nd grade boy saves the day when his class is stranded on an island and he builds a suspension bridge.)

Read: “Frisbee” p.6-7 of Imaginative Inventions by Charise Mericle Harper (609 HAR) named after the Frisbie Pie pan used by Yale students as the original flying saucer game.

More great inventors:

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So You Want to Be an Inventor by Judith St. George and other Dewey 609s – e.g. Dotty Inventions and Some Real Ones Too, Girls Think of Everything: Stories of Ingenious Inventions by Women and Inventions that Could Have Changed the World But Didn’t .

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