Age of Exploration Unit

Hey, this is Future Ticia of 2019, I originally wrote this post in 2016 a few years after the last time we studied the Age of Exploration and went through our Age of Exploration Unit for Elementary School (or middle school since this was designed for my 5th grade kids). Now my kids are in high school and we’re going through the Age of Exploration for the last time (cue sad crying from Ticia), and I’m looking back at what I taught last time and repeating and expanding on information. These old posts have been a great help for me to plan my current lessons

I decided I wanted a big challenge, and so for the entire month of October I’m going to be writing about a big huge giant Age of Exploration Unit, it’s going to cover some homeschool science, some homeschool reading and writing (because I found some amazing books), and a lot of homeschool history lessons, and it’s the best kind of history because it’s interactive.

While I’m at it, there’s going to be some mini-units in here, just to break it down a little bit.

I originally had plans of this Age of Exploration unit being posted in historical order, but then I remembered Columbus Day is early in October, so I wanted to post that part of my Explorers unit early, and why this unit is present a little screwy in order.  To give you an idea of what’s coming in this Age of Exploration unit, here’s my goals for the month (presented approximately in historical order, and now in 2019 updated with further posts I did later when we studied Texas history, and learned about MORE explorers):

Sailor’s Life Unit

 

• Explorer’s unit resources
• Sailor’s costume
• Ship’s Log
• Portolan navigation
• Quadrant 
• Chip Log
• How to make hard tack
• Sailor’s Food
• Current Experiments 1
• Current Experiments 2
• Age of Exploration Game

Marco Polo

• Marco Polo resources
• Travel pouch 
• Marco polo writing prompts
• China market
• Marco Polo resources

Columbus Unit

• Columbus resources
• Columbus presentation
• Columbus’s ships
• The Colombian Exchange
• Christopher Colubmus: great or awful?

 

Age of Exploration Unit, everyone else

These are all important people, but none of the rate an entire unit by themselves, because while they changed the world, it wasn’t as earth shattering of a change as Marco Polo and Columbus.

• From Plato to Sir Francis Drake
• Leif Ericson
• Discovery of Iceland
• Prince Henry the Navigator
• Bartolomeu Dias
• Vasco de Gama
• Ferdinand Magellan
• Henry Hudson
• Discovery of Australia

So, that’s my big huge aggressive plan, fingers crossed I can pull it off.

 

What I added for high school Age of Exploration Unit

The entire month of October is the Age of Exploration (again amusingly enough), and as part of our history lessons I put together an Age of Exploration playlist on YouTube. These videos are intended for junior high and high school kids, but I would always preview my playlist. What I’m okay with my kids watching, you may not be, and I sometimes put in videos I disagree with so we can talk through WHY we disagree with it, and how people are reframing history to serve a purpose (we all do this, so it’s not a unique thing).

This is also an ever growing playlist as I find more cool videos to add in. There are also some explorers who I just could not find a satisfactory video of them. Whereas some other explorers everyone has a video on.

Can you tell I’m super excited for this Age of Exploration Unit?

I hope you’re as excited as I am.  Fingers crossed I pull off this big huge project, I’ve been working on it since January.  If you don’t want to miss a single post in this series, then you need to sign up for my newsletter, you’ll get some freebies in there from time to time that haven’t made it into posts yet, and the theoretical versions of ebooks I aspire to write.

 

Check out more great history ideas over at the Massive Guide to Homeschooling History

Originally published October 1, 2016