As part of our learning for Black History Month 2023, in Reception, we looked at a man called Garrett Morgan who was an inventor! We first talked about what it means to ‘invent’ something, then moved on to look at who Garrett Morgan was and what his invention was.

We discovered that in America, in 1923, Garrett Morgan invented a type of three-way traffic light/signal to help prevent crashes between horses and carts, bicycles and to also keep pedestrians safe. Reception enjoyed looking at some drawings of Garrett’s design and we also talked about how our modern traffic lights are similar in some ways and not in others.

As part of our activity, we then had a go at painting our own traffic lights/signals. We also managed to talk a little bit about colour theory and mixing as we experimented with understanding which colours can be mixed together to make the colours that we needed for our lights.

Remember – RED means STOP! AMBER means SLOW DOWN! GREEN means GO!