Creating an Invention Convention for Your Classroom
By Caroline Wyman
As the new third-grade teacher, I recall wanting to validate myself as the newcomer on board. I didn't want to blend in with the other third-grade teachers and simply follow their lead. Of course, I would follow the required curriculum standards, and I fully intended to do this well. I also wanted to learn from my peer and seasoned teachers.
But something made me want to find a way to stand out from the other teachers. And I wanted to do that by making my students feel special. Maybe I could develop a project that only my class worked on every year. The project would be exclusively theirs. I wanted it to be the project that other students looked forward to being involved with when they reached third grade.
My quest began that first year. At the time, we were using Silver Burdett Ginn as our integrated approach to reading and language arts. Their first theme was "Creative Imaginations." After completing a few of the Creative Imagination stories and the lessons that followed, a story, David Weisner's June 29, 1999, was next on the schedule. Ironically, June 29 is my birthday and this was the story that gave me the idea to have an extended lesson that did not follow the standardized curriculum. The story was science fiction, set in the future. I noticed that the story’s content developed in my class a sense of creativity—thoughts and ideas that eventually made us want to create our own inventions. The seed of an idea was sown.
Excited, I sent out a letter to the parents and students describing our upcoming Invention Convention and outlining directions for the students to follow at home and in the classroom. The project was fairly easy to complete, with only two requirements.
The major requirement was that each student's invention had to solve a problem by creating something unique. We brainstormed ideas in the classroom and talked about inventions and how they historically evolved to solve a problem. Students worked out the details of their ideas at home and then brought them back to me for approval. I wanted to make sure we were all on the same page before their projects proceeded.
The second requirement was that students had to be able explain their invention by describing how they got their idea, the problem the invention solved, and the steps they took in creating their invention.
As we worked through this process, the idea we had planted for having an interactive Invention Convention came to fruition. As a class, we decided to present our inventions to the lower grades. We would do this by arranging our classroom in a "convention" layout so that visiting students would be able to move easily around the room, view the inventions, watch demonstrations, and have the inventors explain their projects and answer any questions.
The results were more than expected. The students loved showing off their inventions! They felt pride in what they had created. Some students even wanted to try to get their invention patented. We enlisted the local newspaper to cover our event—it was thrilling to see news of our classroom printed in black and white. We were special. We accomplished something uniquely our own. It was the most exciting time of the year for my class. We treasured the creativity, we loved the attention, and we were proud of each other.
Would I recommend having an Invention Convention to teachers who want to shine through the success of their students? Absolutely!
Caroline Wyman has a degree in Sociology and a Masters in Elementary Education and is the administrator for TeacherNet.com.