Title: When Everything Went Wrong: 10 Real Stories of Inventors Who Didn’t Give Up!
Author: Max Temporelli and Barbara Gozzi
Major Themes: Inventions, Inventors
Synopsis: How did ten different inventors learn from their mistakes or turn their mistakes into something useful?
When I saw When Everything Went Wrong, I knew I wanted to read it to my children. The next thing to think about was when to work it into our day. Our homeschool is based around reading aloud, but sometimes it’s hard to know when to fit in a particular title. I decided I could count a book about inventors as science, so for a week we read two chapters each day from this book. My three school-aged children wanted more each time! I love it when a book brings that request.
This book is sort of a cross between a graphic book and a chapter book. There are ten chapters, each focusing on a different inventor. Each chapter begins with a page of history about the person, with a cartoonish picture of him or her on the facing page. Next are two to four pages in the style of a comic book about how the person perfected his or her most famous invention. After that are a couple more pages of text with more details about the invention, with more illustrations.
Some of the inventors described are well-known, such as Thomas Alva Edison with his light bulb or Guglielmo Marconi and the radio. Others are more obscure, like Jan Ernst Matzeliger and his mass-produced shoes or Wilson Greatbatch (what a name!) and the pacemaker. The other people featured in this short book are James Dyson, Margarete Steiff, Stephanie Louise Kwolek, Charles Goodyear, Percy Spencer, and John Stith Pemberton.
It seems that any book written in the style of a comic book is an instant hit with my children. They loved looking at the cartoon pages, and really enjoyed the way these people and their inventions were described. I thought this was a very effective way to briefly introduce a number of inventors and encourage children that mistakes are fine. We read a digital copy, but I would love to have this book on our shelves.
I received a complimentary copy of this book from NetGalley, and these are my honest thoughts about it.
No warnings!
Age levels:
Listening Level—Ages 5 – 8, 8 – 12
Reading Independently—Ages 7 – 9, 8 – 12
Links to buy this book:
Amazon: Kindle | Hardcover
AbeBooks: View Choices on AbeBooks.com
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