Customer Reviews

Brainstorm!: The Stories of Twenty American Kid Inventors

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Brainstorm! is a great book about child inventors. Children in grades 3 through 6 will enjoy it. Each chapter -- averaging 2 to 5 pages -- focuses on a child and his or her inventions. There are plenty of female inventors, and the book includes some inventions that are modest as well as ground-breaking. This book will inspire children to have confidence in their ideas.

This book allowed me relate stories of kid inventors to my classroom students. These stories were easy for them to relate to and showed them that we value their ideas and contributions. They can be used to inpsire the next generation of kid inventors.

Reason for Reading: Came with our history curriculum. Read aloud to my ds, a biography at a time over a period of time.

A collection of short biographies featuring kid inventors, focusing on what they invented and how it came to be. Includes such inventions as earmuffs, coloured car wax, the Popsicle, water skis, resealable cereal box tops and others.

Neither of us was particularly thrilled with this book. The inventions I've mentioned above were the ones that ds enjoyed most. A lot of the other inventions were things he couldn't care less about like tufted bedspreads or couldn't relate to such as the rotary steam engine. Ds was keen when I started reading a story about a real kid (an 8yo or a 13yo) but some of these bios are about 17 or 18 year old's and that is pushing it a bit for a 10yo to consider a kid. Then some bios often were about how the inventor got the idea as a kid but didn't bring it to fruition until they were an adult which I think is cheating in regards to the title of the book. Also any mechanical or engineering inventions such as the electrical TV and the rotary steam engine were very detailed with scientific specifics which made the 10 yo's eyes glaze over. By the time we got to the last 5 stories he was begging me not to read the book anymore so I read them quickly in bed one night to if they were worth trudging through and I couldn't find any reason he needed to hear them so we ended the read-aloud there. I wouldn't recommend the book.