This is a month to celebrate the great contributions made by African Americans in areas such as music, art, civil rights, sports, food and inventions.
One of these inventors was Garrett Morgan who was a descendent of former slaves. He came up with several inventions but his most well known one is probably the traffic signal. It was not exactly like the red, green and yellow traffic lights we have today but it was the start of controlling the flow of traffic.
At the early part of the last centuries when there were starting to be more cars, there was chaos on the roads. Horse drawn carriages, people and cars all shared the streets with no particular concern for safety. One day Garret Morgan witnessed an accident and decided to use his inventing skills to come up with a way of bringing order to the roads.
He invented the traffic signal that was a T-shaped pole featuring 3 positions: stop, go and an all directional stop position. This halted all traffic so people could cross more safely.
Here is a poem to learn before making you traffic lights. It will help you place the lights in the correct order.
Red on top,
Green below.
Yellow in the middle.
Red means stop!
Green means go!
Yellow means wait even if you're late.
You will Need:
- Black, green, red, yellow construction paper
- Scissors
- Pencil
- Circle tracer
- Glue
Instructions:
- Cut the sheet of black construction paper in half lengthwise to make a long skinny rectangle.
- Trace circles on the red, green and yellow paper so they will fit on the black rectangle.
- Glue the circles on in the right order following the traffic light poem above.
Play the game "Red Light, Green Light".
Children will line up at one end of a room with a leader at the other end whose back is to the rest of the children.
He says "green light" and all the children begin moving forward cautiously. When he says "red light", he will turn quickly to see if he can see anyone moving. Whoever he catches must go back and start again. The first person to the leader then replaces the leader.
[Photographs by Linda Dunbar. Reproduction prohibited]
