More About Explorers

We have spent several hours the past few days (at Alexandra's request!) studying more about the explorers of North & South America. Yesterday, we read Land Ho! Fifty Glorious Years in the Age of Exploration by Nancy Winslow Parker. It was a good book with nice illustrations that covered a dozen explorers. As we read, Alexandra used our wall map of the world. It was also neat to see under which flag each explorer sailed under - most of them sailing for Spain. After reading, we drew pictures of ships like in the book and using Draw, Write, Now.

Today, we read So You Want to Be an Explorer? by Judith St. George. This covers a lot of other explorers - not just those of the Age of Exploration and not just "traditional" explorers.

Then, we read Leif's Sage: A Viking Tale by Jonathan Hunt. This was a nice story about Leif's discovery of "Vinland." Also, the book contains letters called runes. On the last page is the "decoder." We worked on decoding them, but will have to try again tomorrow. We did decode the 1st page, and that was neat!

Another book we read was Leif the Lucky by d'Aulaire. I really like this book because it also talks about Leif's conversion to Christianity.

Lastly, a book we haven't read, but that looks good: Around the World in a Hundred Years: From Henry the Navigator to Magellan by Jean Fritz.