Explorers Unit Study and Lapbook

Last fall my oldest kids did an Explorers Unit Study and Lapbook. (I know I’m a bit late in posting this, but better late than never!)

We were able to go on a field trip last summer where we went on board two replicas of Columbus’ ships–The Nina and the Pinta. The thing I was most amazed about these ships were that they were so small! Here is the website so you can see if the ships will be sailing near you!

Pulling the anchor up:

Old-fashioned navigational techniques:

The rudder:

There are some great books about explorers at the library (such as Around the World in One Hundred Years by Jean Fritz), so I checked out lots of them. A living book/ historical fiction that I read aloud was called The High Voyage: Final Crossing of Christopher Columbus by Olga Litowinsky, which was written from the perspective of Columbus’ son Fernando. We also read Voyages of Dr. Dolittle by Hugh Lofting for fun.

My oldest son did notebooking pages from NotebookingPages. He wrote a summary and drew a picture on each page about a different explorer. There wasn’ t a page for Lewis and Clark, Roald Amundson, or James Cook, so I just found pictures of them online and we made up our own pages for those.

Here are some pictures of the lapbook by 7 yo son did. We used the project pack from Hands of a Child called Explorers of the World.