Famous Explorers

Date: 23rd Mar 2018 @ 9:30pm

Week Commencing Monday 19th March 2018

In history this week we have been looking at famous explorers. We began by learning about Christopher Columbus and how, in 1492, he was trying to find a new route to Asia to trade spices and silk, but ended up in America! We thought about the difficult journey the sailors would have had aboard the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria and how frightened and nervous they would have been about travelling across an unexplored ocean. 

The children were really surprised to discover the sort of "treasure" Columbus brought back from what he called the New World. It wasn't the traditional gold, silver or gems we guessed it might be. In fact Columbus brought back amongst other things, tomatoes, potatoes, pineapples, peppers and butternut squash.

We also looked at why Neil Armstrong and, more recently Tim Peake, were important people in history. We watched Neil Armstrong take the first steps on the moon and compiled a fact file all about Tim Peake and the time he spent on the international space station. We then imagined what it would be like if we had been an intrepid explorer investigating the surface of the moon. We wrote postcards to our loved ones at home describing what we had discovered and what the moon was like. The children produced some lovely postcards full of great adjectives to describe their time on the moon and there was some fabulous use of apostrophes to shorten or merge words together (contractions). Our postcards are displayed in class for everyone to see.