Inventing Peanut Butter

This week we started a fun new unit of plants for Spring. With this unit we are learning about George Washington Carver who is well known for his work in the farming/plant world - he taught about crop rotation, found uses for healthy crops, was known as a 'plant doctor' and more. We read a couple of books, did some online research and watched a kid friendly video at BrainPopJr.com. He has a rich history and was an amazing person!

A fun fact Holly enjoyed was that George Washington Carver invented Peanut Butter. So we had some fun with that and made our own peanut butter. She created the shopping list from our recipe, found all the ingredients at the store and made the peanut butter. We compared it to our typical store bought peanut butter, which was fun. She learned the store bought is very sweet and loaded with sugar where as ours had no sugar at all but was a bit salty and more oily. This was a lot of fun and yummy!!!

We also enjoyed some math fun by taking a group of shelled peanuts and graphing whether the shells contained one or two peanuts. Holly also inspected a peanut and included her drawings and findings in her nature journal... so much could be done with this, it is hard to limit it some.

I would like to do more with various inventors, however I would like to find or create a nice basic journal sheet that Holly could work with on basic historical facts on our inventor, a drawing of them, their contributions, successes and failures, etc. If anyone knows of anything like this could you please let me know before I create something? Thanks!