Virginia McGregor, Students Vanessa and Madeline, and Sherry Grant pose with biography resources

Teacher-librarian Sherry Grant and 5th-grade classroom teacher Virginia McGregor taught this unit in April and May of 2007 at Anasazi School in Scottsdale, Arizona. They taught the initial lesson as a team in the library and taught additional lessons individually in the library and in the classroom.

They adapted the students' final product. Instead of writing a summary paragraph, the students used ReadWriteThink.org's electronic, interactive tool called bio-cube.

Although this pathfinder is not included in the lesson plan in the book, students and educators can use it as a resource to introduce this lesson. It can also be used to supplement print information about kid inventors. If educators expand the inventor and inventions research to include adult inventors, these Web sites may be particularly useful.

Instead of or in addition to writing summaries, use Imaginative Inventions (rhyming poems) or The Inventor's Times: Real-Life Stories of 30 Amazing Creations (newspaper articles) as models for alternate ways to communicate main ideas and supporting details.

Along with third-grade teacher Jenny Himmelstein, I cotaught this unit of instruction, including the extension, in 1999 and 2000. This is an example of one team of students' telecomputing project. They were challenged to make an envelope licker that did not require using one's tongue. After they created their invention, they wrote a group summary that included the problem, their solution, relevant details, and the life skills they used as they pursued this challenge.

AASL Standards for the 21st-Century Learner:

• Read, view, and listen for information presented in any format (e.g., textual, visual, media, digital) in order to make inferences and gather meaning. (1.1.6)
• Organize knowledge so it is useful. (2.1.2)
• Assess the quality and effectiveness of the learning product. (3.4.2)