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

October 9, 2016 Ticia 4 Comments

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 being 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.

Life of a Sailor activities Explorers unit

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

the life of a sailor good or bad?

First, I’ll start off with a sailor’s costume.  With Halloween coming up, and 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.

tea dyeing paper to make ship's logbook craft

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.

how to make a quadrant

 

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).

chip log project

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

portolan navigation

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

hard tack

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.

warm-water-to-cold-water-experiment

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!

Age of Exploration unit

See the entire series at The Age of Exploration Unit.

history Age of Exploration, Mystery of History 3

Comments

  1. Lucinda says

    October 9, 2016 at 11:09 am

    Whenever I visit you here I always go away with so many ideas. I just love seeing your creativity at work.

    Reply
    • Ticia says

      October 9, 2016 at 9:28 pm

      Thanks! I had so much fun planning out this unit.

  2. Natalie PlanetSmartyPants says

    October 9, 2016 at 6:08 pm

    Looking forward to this one as well. My daughter is going out as a pirate this Halloween… again 🙂

    Reply
    • Ticia says

      October 9, 2016 at 9:29 pm

      My kids are wearing their costumes from Williiamsburg. I might have told them I was making that and ONLY that this year.

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Ticia Adventures in Mommydom Hi, I'm Ticia! This is the adventures of my family in life and learning. Follow along with us as we share our adventures. We're having a lot of fun and learning as we go.

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