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.
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