Saturday, December 9, 2006 - Inventors Unit - the Radio

DD9 looked up “radio” in the index and read applicable pages about the invention of the radio in The Picture History of Great Inventors.
We read about how Guglielmo Marconi came to invent the first radio in The Story of Inventions (pg. 315). DD9 also read a short biography and answered comprehension questions.

Both girls made up Inventor Trading Cards for Marconi, and renamed him “Googly Elmo Macaroni” because they thought it was easier to remember. J
 We read about how a radio works, and the different parts in Inventions and Discoveries That Improved Our Daily Lives. The girls drew pictures of the different radio waves and identified them for inventors’ notebooks. The girls looked at the radios around the house to identify the tuner, volume control, and speakers, and looked at a clear-cased radio to view the circuit board with resistors, transistors, and antenna.

They assembled an FM radio kit we had ordered from Amazon, again identifying and locating all the parts, and it worked!

We discussed how the radio changed America. Ships were required to have radios, communication was a lot faster, and it gave many Americans a new source of entertainment. We have been listening to old radio shows from http://www.homeschoolradioshows.com/ and discussing a time when families would sit around a radio and listen together, before television.  As an added bonus, the girls got to talk to a “Real Live Radio Guy” that was airing at the Grand Opening of a new store in the area.