Who made a better hairbrush, and how do we know? This ready-to-teach packet turns a short song into three lessons on reading, history and engineering.
In Somebody Before Me: Lyda Newman & the Hairbrush, a curious child meets Lyda Newman, a Black hairdresser and inventor in New York City. The brushes of her day were hard to keep clean and did not work well for many of her customers, so she designed a brush with rows of bristles, spaces for air and a bristle holder that pops out for cleaning. Students then look at her real 1898 patent to find out how we know. They also learn that she later led work to help Black women in New York win the right to vote.
What's inside (24-page printable PDF):
3 sessions of 30–40 minutes each: Who Made This?, How Do We Know? and What Will YOU Make?
A Patent Detective page built on the original 1898 patent drawing. Students find the maker, date and place, like real historians.
Two reading levels (K–1 and grades 2–3) with comprehension questions
Easy-Clean Brush Test: a hands-on engineering test. Which pretend brush is easier to clean, crowded or rows with spaces?
Sing-along lyric sheet, word cards, a problem-and-solution page, a timeline to cut and sort, and a then-and-now page
My Invention Plan and a Classroom Patent certificate
Standards: Common Core RI.2.1, RI.2.3, RI.2.7, W.2.2 and SL.2.1; NGSS K-2-ETS1-1, K-2-ETS1-2 and K-2-ETS1-3; C3 Framework D2.His.2.K-2 and D2.His.11.K-2
Teacher background, teaching-with-care notes (including what the patent does and doesn't tell us), differentiation, a family page, an answer key and full source links
Works with the free video on Teach Between the Lines TV (about 1 minute 20 seconds, captions on screen).
Few records or images of Lyda Newman survive, so her look in the video is an artist's imagining.
License: one teacher, for use with their own students. Please do not share, post publicly or resell.