George Washington Carver: The Peanut Wizard

George Washington Carver: The Peanut Wizard
The book that I decided to use for the biography of a person who has made a contribution to science, technology, or engineering is called George Washington Carver: The Peanut Wizard, written by Laura Driscoll and illustrated by Jill Weber. This book comes

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from the Smart About… collection which consists of educational books dealing with a number of different subjects. This book is extremely unique because it is written as though it were a student’s report. Along with the basic story of George Washington Carver’s life, it also includes ideas for science experiments and even some recipes that include peanut butter. The student who apparently created this report is a little girl by the name of Annie Marcus. It was created in response to three questions that were posed by her teacher, Ms. Brandt. Those three questions were: “Did your favorite scientist find out something new, something that nobody had known about? How did your scientist make his or her discovery? Lastly, did you do any type of experiment for your report?” The reason that Annie chose to do her report on George Washington Carver is because she is absolutely crazy about peanut butter. She states that she eats way more of it than the average American who consumes about six pounds of it per year. The other characters in the book are: obviously George Washington Carver, his mother, his brother, Jim, Susan and Moses Carver, and finally, Booker T. Washington.
The setting for this book is interesting because it starts out at Annie’s home as she introduces the purpose for the project, but then it also travels along with George Washington Carver as Annie re-tells the story of his life. The first stop that the setting makes along his incredible journey is at his boyhood home, the Carver farm located in Diamond Grove Missouri. The next setting for the book is a series of short stops that George Washington Carver made while attempting to find a school for black children that could teach him all he wanted to know about how plants grow. The following stop is the college in which George attended. Unfortunately, this college is never specifically named. The final stop of this journey ends at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama where George taught for forty-seven years.
The plot of this book is exactly what one might expect from a biography in that it consists of simply re-telling the events that occurred in George Washington Carver’s life in chronological order. George started out his life as a slave to Susan and Moses Carver, however once his mother died, they took his brother Jim and him in as their own sons. George took up an extreme interest in plants and the way they grew very early in his life. People even began to call him “the plant doctor.” Due to the fact that George was black, he was forced to travel to find an all black school that he would be able to attend, but then further struggled to find one that could teach him all he wanted to learn. After his normal schooling, George attended college, and was then asked to become a professor at Tuskegee Institute, where he taught until he died. George completely changed that way that farmers thought of sweet potatoes and peanuts. He helped them to see the many uses of them, and that growing them could earn quite a profit. This book would probably be appropriate for a second to third grade level, and I would definitely recommend it for any lessons dealing with plants. As I stated earlier, it actually includes ideas for science projects that could be implemented in a classroom type setting.

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