What was a sailor’s life like? Life of a Sailor Unit

I have to admit as I sat down and started writing out the posts and my ideas for this Life of a Sailor unit, it kept expanding.  I started out thinking I only had a few ideas to write about, and by the time I’d finished brainstorming, I had almost 10 ideas and decided to cut it off there.   That was a whole lot of homeschool history to write in a very short time.  Most of it is great hands-on learning or pretend play stuff.  At least in my house, the kids all played with most of this stuff for a good long time.

So, what’s happening for this part of my Exploration Unit?  What is this Life of a Sailor Unit?

First, I’ll start off with a sailor’s costume.  With Halloween coming up, I know quite a few private schools let their students dress up for Halloween, but require it to be someone from history.  This is a quick costume they’ll put together from what they probably have in their house.

And, for our writing component, we need somewhere to write, so we’ve got a ship’s log craft.  When we put this together I made a bunch of extra pages, so they’re sitting on my desk waiting to be used.

Once you’re on the open seas, you need to steer.  You’ll want a quadrant (I need to get a good picture, so you’ll just have to wait for later).

You’re steering now, but how fast are you going?  How deep is the water?  Find out with a chip log.

Using all of the information you now have, learn how to navigate using Portolan navigation, a technique refined by the Portuguese.

Of course, sailor’s need to eat, and they weren’t known for having the best food.  We’ll make some hard tack (and I’ll tell a fun story about hard tack from history), and the next day we’ll see what the rest of a sailor’s meal might be like.

We’ll finish up the Life of a Sailor unit with a couple of experiments about the ocean current.

All told, this is a fun little unit to go within the bigger unit.

The Age of Exploration Unit!

See the entire series at The Age of Exploration Unit.