Mt. St. Helens erupted on May 18, 1980. I was living in Northern California at the time, and we had ash falling on us from the sky. For so many of us, volcanoes are something we think of as having happened long ago and far away — the eruption of Mt. St. Helens changed our minds.

57 people died in that eruption.

Share this with your students:

Point out the image in the video (1:17) showing the dome as it forms and let your students know that something similar is happening right now in South America, in the so-called “sombrero uplift.” The current uplift is growing at about the same rate as fingernails. Mt. St. Helens was growing at a rate of six feet a day. Have students figure out how to chart the difference in the rates at which the volcanoes are/were progressing.

Visit Annenberg Learner’s interactive volcanoes exhibit (use your projector) to learn the basics about how volcanoes form, how they can be predicted, and how people deal with the dangers of volcanoes.

Now that you have your students’ attention, here are two lesson plans we like to use to study volcanoes. The first, a literature based study, is a good choice for upper elementary, while the second is suited to middle school or older.

21 Balloons

• Read The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pene du Bois and check out a fun Flash movie summarizing the book. Challenge students to catch the typos.
• Check out our hot air balloon classroom theme for more resources.
• Learn about heat and decide whether the 21 balloons really would have been able to escape the volcano as they did in the book.
• Have students design and draw their own balloons.
• Compare Krakatoa in the book with the real Krakatoa, located in Indonesia. Study more about the rainforests of Southeast Asia, where Krakatoa is located.

Preparing for volcanic eruptions

• Are you in the path of a volcano? Use the USGS map to find the nearest volcano to your school. Use Google Maps (or just ask Google directly) to find the distance from your school to the volcano.
• Determine whether you would be in any danger if the nearest volcano erupted. Divide students into ten pairs or teams and give each team one of the Time Magazine Top  Ten Volcanic Eruptions to research.
• Have students add the eruption they’re researching to the class timeline and map. Each team should also identify the furthest point at which effects of the eruptions were reported. Compare the distances with your distance from the nearest volcano.
• If you determine that your school would be affected by an eruption, list the effects you might encounter. Note that the 1815 eruption of Indonesia’s Mt. Tambora, the largest recorded eruption, affected the world’s climate so much that crops failed in Europe and North America. Use this information to remind students to consider consequences beyond the most obvious ones.
• Scientists like those in the video above now can predict volcanic eruptions in ways they couldn’t in the past, so people are usually warned. Check out the CDC’s advice on preparing for volcanoes. Compare this information with the disaster preparedness training you usually cover in school (such as preparation for earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, severe storms, etc.) and take the opportunity to remind students of the importance of disaster preparedness.
• Develop a plan for your school if the nearest volcano should erupt. Depending on your location, it might include preparing for evacuation, staying inside to avoid ash, or raising funds for distant victims of the volcano.

Online resources:

• Volcano World’s lesson plans  The site contains lots of photos, virtual field trips, and more. Grab a cup of coffee and explore.
• USGS resources include up to date interactive maps of volcanic activity and alerts.
• Enchanted Learning’s classic volcano diagram
• Discovery Kids Volcano Explorer makes a great game for your computer center.
• Another option is the Volcano Maker

A note on the baking soda and vinegar volcano…

My kids made baking soda and vinegar volcanoes every year in school, I think. I have three problems with this activity:

1. It seems to imply that volcanoes are caused by a chemical interaction, which is not the case.
2. It’s an art project, which is fine, but doing it every year seems to give unwarranted importance to it.
3. Kids get sick of it, even though it’s spectacular, if they do it every year.

If you are determined to conduct this project, put a quarter cup of baking soda into a bottle with some dish soap and a bit of red food coloring. Do something with  the bottle to make it look like a volcano — sand, papier mache, or store-bought volcano kits will all work.

Pour in a half cup of vinegar and stand back to enjoy the show.

World War I can be confusing to modern students. Here are some lesson plans that help make sense of the events and the experience.

Virtual Field Trip

Visit the new online exhibit of the National World War I Museum.

• Begin with the Interactive Timeline. The events are listed and described, but in a format that encourages additional exploration. Turn students loose to figure out the best way to include these events on your classroom timeline.
• Add these events to your classroom map as well.
• Visit Harmonies of the Homefront and listen to the WWI-era songs there. Five songs are available for listening and there are six more sheet music covers to view.  Depending on the grade level of the students, choose a selection of the songs and have students conduct a survey to find out how many people remember these songs. Again depending on the age of your students, they might ask their parents and grandparents, survey friends and neighbors, ask their Facebook or Twitter contacts, arrange to visit a local nursing home to survey the residents, or prepare an online survey with a tool like Survey Monkey.  Create graphs and charts to show the results of the survey.
• Visit Man and Machine, an online exhibition with quotations and photos showing the German soldier’s experience. Challenge students to write about the effects of technology on the war, as reflected in these materials.
• Download the Family Guide and print it out for some fun worksheet activities.
• Teachers can also request lesson plans called Lessons of Liberty.

If you’re near Kansas City, be sure to visit the Museum in person!

Propaganda Posters

One of the online exhibitions  of the WWI Museum is a collection of Canadian propaganda posters. FirstWorldWar.com has an international collection of posters (plus lots of other resources).  Learn NC has American propaganda posters, with interesting commentary on each.

Use these resources to study propaganda posters from World War I. Here are some questions to discuss:

• What did these posters ask people to do? (knit, enlist, give money, grow vegetables, etc.)
• Why were people asked to do these things?
• What emotions did they appeal to?
• Which groups did they reach out to? (women, immigrants, young men, students, etc.)
• Did they show bias against any groups of people?
• What colors did the posters use?
• What styles of art did they use?
• What kinds of lettering did the posters use?

Compare WWI propaganda posters with modern Homeland Security documents. We found the “If You See Something Say Something” campaign, but you may have other examples. Although the United States has been at war during our students’ lifetimes, the American people are not asked to make sacrifices, to enlist, or even to plant vegetables. Have students research or discuss why those requests were made in the past, and why they are not made now. This will help students to understand the way that World War II affected the people “on the home front.”

Challenge students to create a modern propaganda poster, either using the “If You See Something, Say Something” slogan or encouraging people to take some other action.

Those of us who teach Shakespeare can easily be overwhelmed by the — literally — millions of online resources on Shakespeare. You don’t have to spend hours clicking around looking for the best ones, because we already did it for you.

First, the plays:

• The Complete Works: all the words
• No Fear Shakespeare is a parallel translation of Shakespeare into modern English.

Now the background information to help place Shakespeare in time and space:

• Shakespeare Online: a retro site that requires some persistent browsing, but totally worth it
• Shakespeare Research Guide
• An interactive timeline of Shakespeare’s life
• A Shakespeare Google Earth Tour inspired by that timeline, written up as an assignment
• Macbeth: A Google Lit Trip
• A Shakespeare Atlas for Google Earth

Some things people think about Shakespeare:

• Lectures on specific critical questions about various plays, from Oxford
• Shawn and Shakespeare: an interesting collection of personal essays on Shakespeare’s plays, plus reviews of movies.
• The New York Times on Shakespeare

When it comes to video, you can probably find a film of any scene you might want to show in class. Go to YouTube and search for the specific scene, or for conversations between characters (“Othello and Iago” for example) to avoid having to wade through too many options.

We also want to point out a couple of general introductory videos about Shakespeare that should pique students’ interest at the beginning of the study:

This is a wonderful time to be studying Shakespeare!

Othello is a tale of love, jealousy, murder, war, and betrayal. It’s a great story, with enough action to motivate students who find the language difficult to struggle through it, and poetry that makes reading the play a pleasure.

In the play, Othello, a war hero visiting Venice, falls in love with and marries Desdemona, the daughter of a Venetian nobleman. They run off and marry against the wishes and without the knowledge of her father, Brabantio. Iago, passed over for promotion in favor of Michael Cassio, sets out to destroy Othello. He uses other people to accomplish his ends, slyly planting ideas in their heads. He has his wife, Emilia, steal a handkerchief that Othello gave to Desdemona and plants it on Cassio, then uses it to persuade Othello that Desdemona is being unfaithful to him with Cassio. In a jealous rage, Othello kills Desdemona. When Emilia reveals Iago’s plot and it becomes clear that Desdemona was innocent, Othello kills himself.

Begin by reading the play. This is a play most suitable for older students, so we generally assign it as homework, encouraging students to use Google and YouTube as resources to help them grasp the story. We watch a few pivotal scenes in the classroom and read through the play together, discussing each scene and acting out important sections to make sure everyone has gotten the story.

We follow up with these lessons:

Get to know the characters

There are eight major characters in the play:

• Othello
• Iago
• Desdemona
• Cassio
• Emilia
• Roderigo
• Brabantio
• The Duke of Venice

Write the names of these characters on the board  and elicit descriptions of them from the class. Adjectives like these may turn up in the discussion:

• honorable
• innocent
• gullible
• manipulative
• sneaky
• wise
• honest
• dishonest
• foolish
• worldly
• devoted
• romantic

This is a good opportunity to work on choosing the best adjective out of many choices, and on getting the clearest possible idea of the meaning of abstract characteristics.

Ask for volunteers for each of the main characters and have them act out the bare bones of the story. We let students simply gather at the front of the classroom, move into the various groupings, and explain what happened, saying things like, “Roderigo got mad at Iago, but then Iago got around him again.” The object here is simply to make the complex relationships among the characters clear.

Have each character gather helpers from the “audience” so the class is divided into eight groups. Each group should then choose a line or brief speech that really shows the nature of their character. Have the original volunteer or a new volunteer from the group read the line(s) and explain why the group chose that passage to show the essential nature of the character.

We follow up with a writing assignment, asking for an essay on one of the characters. Ask for a clear thesis about the character, supported by specific lines from the play as well as the student’s thoughts and experiences of the emotions and relationships associated with that character.

Jealousy

Othello is all about jealousy, “the green-eyed monster that mocks the meat it feeds on.”

• Iago is jealous of Cassio, whom Othello gave the job that Iago wanted. This comes up in the first scene of the play.
• Iago may also be jealous of Othello’s relationship with Desdemona, because she takes the time and attention that Othello used to have for Iago. Eamonn Walker’s essay “Othello in Love,” in Living with Shakespeare: Essays by Writers, Actors, and Directors , goes into this idea thoroughly. We like to read this essay in class in preparation for the students’ essays on characters (in the lesson idea above).
• Othello’s jealousy is the most obvious in the play — through Iago’s manipulation, Othello comes to believe that Desdemona has been unfaithful to him with Cassio.
• Roderigo is jealous of Othello because he himself wanted Desdemona, and is able to be persuaded by Iago that he could have Desdemona if Othello were out of the picture.
• Bianca is jealous over Cassio, though she doesn’t know whose handkerchief he brings to her. As a courtesan, she may know that Cassio won’t really marry her, but she continues to hope that he will.

Watch and read this scene:

Use No Fear Shakespeare if students need further support in reading the scene.

Note all the ways that Iago puts the idea that Desdemona is unfaithful into Othello’s head, while pretending to be a good friend to Othello. Identify the tricks he plays, such as saying that Cassio is honest repeatedly in an insincere voice, or making Othello drag his suspicions out of him instead of telling him directly.

Keeping in mind that the accusations against Desdemona are false, ask students to role play a similar scene in modern times and in their own context.

Have students search the text of the play to find other places where this kind of manipulation takes place.

Discuss whether it is the fault of Iago or of those he manipulates when they become jealous and behave badly. Look at the three couples in the play: Othello/Desdemona, Cassio/Bianca, Iago/Emilia. Notice all the relationships among them, and between these individuals and the other characters in the play. Is all the jealousy manufactured by Iago? Does the play offer lessons about jealousy?

Would have, could have, should have

Regardless of Iago’s manipulations, Othello and Desdemona do run off together and get married. In the 1600s — and even today — running off secretly together rather than openly courting and planning their wedding was bound to upset people.

It is usually assumed that Brabantio, who was so sure that his daughter couldn’t love Othello that he assumes she must have been stolen away with witchcraft or drugs, would never have allowed Desdemona to marry Othello. Othello is black while Desdemona and Brabantio are white, he is an outsider, and he has no family background to equal that of Desdemona’s family.

However, Othello is also a friend of Brabantio’s, welcome in his home, and widely admired. When Othello and Desdemona talk with Brabantio in front of the Duke, they are respectful, loving, and persuasive. What if they had behaved this way from the beginning, talking with Brabantio and helping him get used to the idea? What if Othello had courted Desdemona in the way which was appropriate in their time and place? Could this story have had a happy ending?

As a class, identify the points at which things might have been different — if Emilia had refused to steal the handkerchief, if Othello had realized that Iago wasn’t really his friend, if Desdemona had gone for help when Othello began to be cruel to her…

Have students choose one of those points and write a new ending for the play. Act out or perform as reader’s theater some or all of the alternate endings.

Would the play have been as powerful with a happy ending? Would it have been a better play? Discuss the idea of a tragedy and why (or whether) people continue to enjoy tragedies.

Online resources

• NoFear Shakespeare’s Othello
• Folger resources on Othello, with some very interesting historical resources
• Oh, Hello, Othello has step by step lessons for each act.
• Images of Othello webquest
• Shakespeare’s Othello and the Power of Language from EdSitement
• A printable PDF lesson from Shakespeare in the Ruins

Jeff Rivera’s books about Yuck Kingdom, Um, Mommy, I Think I Flushed My Brother Down the Toilet and Um, Mommy, I Think I Flushed My Brother Down the Toilet Again paint a picture of what happens when things go down the toilet that can make a fun introduction to the idea of wastewater treatment.

Real and Imaginary

Can people really get flushed down a toilet? Is there really a Yuck Kingdom? Certainky not. But there are things about the stories that ring true: older siblings can love their younger siblings and also find them maddening, kids can try to manipulate parents, and people can band together to stand up to something scary.

Have students list the real and imaginary things in the story.

Then study wastewater treatment and compare the reality with the imaginary Yuck Kingdom:

• Wastewater treatment information  from USGS
• interactive water treatment tour
• GBRA interactive tour
• interactive map

Have students look at these interactive resources and identify the things that are the same in all of them and the things that are different. Are there any parts of Yuck Kingdom that are like real sewage treatment?

Have students draw a line down the middle of a sheet of paper or poster board. Have them draw a scene from Yuck Kingdom on one side and from a real wastewater treatment plant on the other. Label them “Real” and “Imaginary.”

Rhyme

The book has lots of groups of rhyming words. Have students write the words on word cards and sort them into rhyming groups.  Have students find the parts of each group that are the same and the parts that are different. Find the groups where the same sound is spelled in different ways and those where the rhyming sound is spelled in the same way each time.

• shaking
• quaking
• fumbled
• tumbled
• jumbled
• twirled
• swirled
• curled
• sluch
• gush
• mush
• flush
• blush
• swaying
• fraying
• graying
• rusty
• musty
• dusty
• old
• cold
• mold

Some of the groups of rhyming words include made-up words. Find groups of words like these and have students divide the real words from the imaginary ones:

• crying
• mying
• rying

Families

At one point, the young heroine of the story says this about her little brother: “He was a pain, but he was my pain.” Author Jeff Rivera has 12 neices and nephews, so he knows what it’s like to have little brothers and sisters. Ask how many students have younger siblings. Create a list of the things they do that make them a “pain.” Then discuss what’s great about having brothers and sisters.

Some students may not have siblings. Ask whether they have similar experiences with a pet, friend, or relative.

Falisha doesn’t want her mommy to tell her daddy what she has done. She’s able to make things right, and we don’t see her getting in trouble with her dad, or having more than a scolding from her mom. Why do kids get in trouble with their parents? Is it important to make things right when we’ve done something we shouldn’t?

How does Falisha make things right with her brother? How does she make things right with her  mother?

Ask students whether they think Falisha and Jesse will get into trouble again in the future. Have them write a story of their own starring themselves and their sibling, pet, or friend.

Find more ideas for studying about families at our Families theme page.

What’s a rain garden? It’s a lowered garden bed planted with deep-rooted plants which will enjoy being watered by the standing water that pools when it rains hard. They can be planted in areas that already form puddles, or rain that collects on a roof or a paved area can be directed toward an area where a new lowered bed will be dug. Rain gardens help with storm water runoff and erosion, while adding to the beauty of a landscape.

Plan one for your school to get a lesson that combines math, art, ecology, and general earth science to create a terrific learning experience. Take it a step further and plant the garden you plan for a fine service learning project!

Creating a rain garden isn’t much more difficult than making a traditional garden.

1. Observe During the next rainstorm, have the class watch through a window or step into a sheltered area and see where rainwater pools. Use class cameras to capture the location, or use stakes to mark the locations physically. Be sure to locate your rain garden at least 10 feet away from the building so you don’t get a water-logged building.
2. Have students draw maps or use Google Earth to create a map of the school. Mark the locations of potential rain gardens.
3. Decide which location will make the best rain garden.  If you intend to follow up by planting the garden, invite school officials to join this discussion so you can get permission.
4. Is there a depression in the ground already? If not, do the math and determine how large a space to dig. As a rule, your rain garden should be at least 20% as big as the area you hope to drain. So, if rain running off the roof is to be the source of the water for the garden, you’ll need a garden 20% as big as your roof. In fact, a smaller rain garden can help and there’s no such thing as too big a garden, but this step is good real-life math practice.
5. Decide which plants to use. Rain gardens usually use native plants. Our local water district provides a PDF guide to native plants appropriate for our region; your local experts can help you identify good choices. You certainly need plants that don’t mind getting their feet wet, and deep roots are best.
6. Measure the space. Learn how big the plants you’ve chosen will be, and plot the place and number of plants you’ll need. Draw plants into your garden maps with circles showing the mature size of the plants. More great math opportunities here!
7. Contact a local nursery to determine the price of the plants and calculate a budget for your garden.

Actually planting the garden is a wonderful way to follow up.

Next week, you’ll have to change your calendar. And that means that you might as well change the bulletin boards. And that means that it is time to decide: do you have Christmas in the classroom or not?

In our state, Thanksgiving is in the frameworks, so there’s no suspense there. But Christmas is, like Hallowe’en, controversial. Some schools ban all lessons on all holidays (excepting, presumably, those required by the state frameworks), on the grounds that it is impossible to be evenhanded with holidays, observing all of them equally, even if we arbitrarily limit the holidays we cover to those that we believe are celebrated in our particular community. We’re probably wrong when we make that guess, by the way.

There are also many adults, some of them teachers, who have happy childhood memories of classroom holiday celebrations, who feel that we are robbing our students of some wonderful classroom experiences when we don’t honor holidays. And there are those who feel that we are being intellectually dishonest if we skip over Christmas, when it is so widely celebrated in the United States. There are also those who feel that, if we are going to include Christmas in our classrooms, it is essential that we do so in a particular way — usually either with or without its religious significance, again for a variety of reasons.

In short, it is practically impossible not to offend someone at this time of year.

There are several possible approaches:

• Acknowledge that Christmas is widely celebrated here, that the children know about it and are interested, either as part of their own cultural experience or as something interesting about another culture, and decorate with Christmas symbols. Secular Christmas symbols, generally, if you are at a public school. If you go this route, there are lots of ready-made choices, from Santa Claus to Christmas trees and more. We’ll be bringing you ideas for this approach, and lesson plans for some of our favorite holiday books, too.

• Present Christmas as one among many winter holidays that people celebrate. This has the potential to give  kids the impression that, say, Chanukah is “the Jewish Christmas” or Diwali is “the Indian Christmas,” and in general turn diversity into a badly understood mishmash. Carefully done, it can be a great study, but it does have the potential to offend people of many different faiths. As Ethan Stanislawski puts it, “Are we really being egalitarian if we rank the importance of holidays of other religions by their proximity to Christmas?” One solution here is to study multicultural holidays, recognizing the important holidays of various faiths and cultures, regardless of when they are celebrated. TCR’s Multicultural Holidays and The Festive Teacher: Multicultural Activities for Your Curriculum take this approach. So does our Holiday Traditions Lesson Plan.

• Decide that, since you personally celebrate Christmas or do not celebrate Christmas, you will decorate your classroom as you do your home, giving students an opportunity to learn about your customs. This has potential to offend, but you have an answer if anyone brings it up.
• Learn about the ways that Christmas is celebrated around the world, thus offering a sense of diversity without implying that other holidays are variants on Christmas. TCR’s Celebrate Christmas Around the World does a good job of this. We’ll be presenting some fun ideas for this option from our “Christmas Around the World” workshop over the next few weeks.

• Recognize that children, whether they observe Christmas as a secular or as a religious holiday or not at all, are bombarded with holiday messages outside the classroom at this time of year, and decide that they don’t need more in the classroom. Ignore Christmas, and go with something seasonal yet unrelated, like mittens or winter sports or earthquakes (the great New Madrid quakes began in December, you know) or snowmen. It is hard to see how anyone could reasonably be offended by this approach, and we will be bringing you a variety of these options during December.

There are many decoratives nowadays that allow you some flexibility. The Home and Holiday Hearth from Teacher’s Friend lets you focus on general winter topics by putting the clock or the books on the mantelpiece and treating it as a winter scene. One day, you might add stockings and talk about Christmas, or the menorah and talk about Chanukah. In due season, you can switch to the Kwanza symbols, confident that you are making the point that different cultural groups have different celebrations, and that quite a few of them take place in the winter, when it is nice to be at home with your family anyway.

Another flexible option is to go with something which is strongly enough associated with Christmas that students who celebrate that holiday will enjoy it as part of their holiday celebration, without being so strongly associated with the holiday as to make those who do not celebrate it feel left out.

One of these possibilities would be gingerbread. Gingerbread houses are traditional for Christmas, but also work well as a theme on their own.

Check out our lesson plans for “The Gingerbread Boy.”

Other themes that work well for this option are bells, stars, reindeer, and candy.

Those of you teaching at home, in parochial schools, or in churches and other places of worship don’t have this problem. The rest of us can contemplate our choices for the next couple of days.

Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saens may be the perfect introduction to classical music for children, and the Maestro Classics edition is specifically intended for that purpose. The CD and the accompanying booklet have lots of background information about Saint-Saens, who was a musical child prodigy. Kids will enjoy hearing about his public performances of Beethoven at age 6.

They’ll also enjoy the Carnival of the Animals, a collection of pieces of music referencing various animals. The links in the list below go to lesson plans and resources for learning more about the animals in question:

• lion
• rooster
• wild donkeys
• tortoise
• elephants
• kangaroo
• fish/aquarium
• mules
• cuckoos
• birds
• pianists/apes
• fossils
• the swan

Each selection is quite different from the others, from the lovely cello piece “The Swan,” a popular ballet solo, to the clattering bones of “The Fossils.”

The Carnival was composed in February 1886 for a chamber group of flute, clarinet, two pianos, glass harmonica, xylophone, two violins, viola, cello and double bass.  The recording reference here is played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra,  with a glockenspiel instead of a glass harmonica.

The glass harmonic or armonica was invented by Benjamin Franklin. It works by the same principle that lets people play tunes by rubbing their fingers around the edge of a glass. Explore this safely in the classroom with a glass xylophone.

Here are some discussion questions and activities to use with this piece:

• Write up each of the Ogden Nash verses (in the booklet that comes with the recording) and analyze them at the appropriate level for your class, identifying rhymes, memorizing them, or looking up unfamiliar words.
• What makes the lion’s music sound like a lion? What’s elephantine about The Elephant? Challenge students to get specific about the characteristics of each piece that remind them of the animals.
• Listen for specific instruments, such as the cello in The Swan or the piano in Kangaroos.
• Listen and read about Saint-Saens and add events from his life to your classroom timeline.
• Have students learn and sing “Clair de la Lune” with the singalong. Then have them listen for the tune in Kangaroos. They can also hear “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and the can-can in other parts.
• Have students draw the animals as they listen.

Online resources:

• The Boston Philharmonic has a resource guide with masks of the animals and pictures of the instruments as well as some fun activities.
• L.A.’s Music Center has a resource guide with extensive lesson plans.
• SmartBoard lessons
• A coloring book in PDF form from Music Matters Blog

In studying exploration, we tend to focus on the conquistadors of Spain and the great explorers of Italy: Columbus, Magellan, Da Gama, Vespucchi, and Cortez. When we’re thinking of exploration in North America, though, we should remember the French explorers.

There were French explorers during the Great Age of Exploration, including Jaques Cartier, who claimed Canada for France. However, France was engaged in wars during much of the Great Age, and didn’t get serious about exploration until somewhat later. French explorers like la Salle, la Harpe, Marquette, and de Bienville explored the New World in the later 1500s and 1600s, mapping the Mississippi and establishing towns like St. Louis and New Orleans. In the 1700s and 1800s, French explorers like De Surville, Bougainville,  du Fresne, and d’Urville explored Polynesia and what is now New Zealand.

Begin your study of French explorers by learning a bit about France. use our Country Study lesson plans as a starting point. Some online resources:

• Paris 3D is an impressive introduction to the capital city of France. Play the Saga, an interactive exploration of the city that allows you to choose various buildings and different time depths.
• See modern Paris in 3D with Google Earth. The video below gives you a tour, but students may enjoy exploring the city and surrounding countryside on their own. Be sure to turn on the 3D buildings layer.

• France.fr has lots of resources to explore.
• Visit the Louvre.

Once students have a sense of where these explorers were coming from, it’s time to do some research on the individual explorers.

• Have students choose an explorer from Wikipedia’s list of French explorers or the list from the Virtual Museum of New France. Each student can choose one and prepare a report for the class. As a class, determine the minimum information each report should include (consider full name, date of birth, hometown, parents’ occupations, first experience with exploration, reason for choosing this career, and main accomplishments).  Upper elementary school students can find a lot of that information at the sites linked above, but secondary level students should branch out. A search for an individual is a relatively easy way to get started with online research, since there’s little difficulty with synonyms or commercial uses of those names.
• Use file folders, as we did in our Study of Heroes, and create a tablescape of French explorers. Be sure to add each to the class timeline. you can also mark the explorers’ main discoveries on your class map, or have students create a map for their reports.

C9lumbus traveled in the Mediterranean and along the coast of Africa as a trader. He married and had children, but the sea and trading were his primary interests.

Columbus didn’t go to college, but he taught himself to read Latin, Portuguese, and Spanish, and he read many books on astronomy, mathematics, geography, and history. He didn’t just read these books, but studied them, making notes in the margins and returning to the books repeatedly. His studies led him to believe that it was possible to sail westward from Europe and reach Asia, an idea that had been suggested occasionally since the days of Ancient Rome.

The Ottoman Turks had taken over the Silk Road, and it had become much harder for Europeans to get to Asia for trade. Spices and silks were important and profitable trade items for Europeans, so traders of the time were working on new routes to Asia. Sailors from Portugal, where Columbus  lived, thought that ships could sail around Africa and back up to Asia. Columbus thought his westward route would be easier.

People often think that Columbus was the one who realized that the world was round. This is not true; many people since the time of the Ancient Greeks thought the world was round. Columbus had a different idea of geography from most people of his day, though. For one thing, he thought the world was smaller than it actually is. He thought that Japan was far to the east of India, and he thought that the distance between Europe and Asia to the west was therefore not very great. These misunderstandings on his part convinced Columbus that a westward route to Asia was a practical plan.

It took Columbus years to find backers for his idea, probably because his geography didn’t square with what people knew about Asia, but eventually he persuaded Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain to finance his voyages.

In 1492, Columbus set out with three ships, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. He reached an island which he called San Salvador. It is not know which island he was on at the time, though the current island of San Salvador (given the name in 1925) is one possibility. He was somewhere in the Bahamas.

In those days, Europeans called most of the Asia “the Indies.” Columbus thought he had reached Japan, the westernmost part of the Indies.

Columbus actually discovered a place which was previously unknown to Europeans, but he didn’t believe that. He continued to believe that he had reached Asia. Columbus made three more voyages, visiting Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and attempted to colonize Hispaniola, now the Dominican Republic and Haiti. He was unable to manage all his responsibilities, however, and was arrested and removed from his governorship of Hispaniola in 1500. He made another voyage after that arrest, but died in 1506.

Columbus wasn’t interested only in discovery. He wanted plenty of rewards in return for his service to Spain. He was given the title Admiral of the Ocean Sea and granted a coat of arms. He had four “books of privileges” made to record the deals he made with Spain, and later in his life he sued the Spanish court for the privileges he believed he was entitled to under those agreements. Some of the rights he negotiated include 10% of all the profits made from the new lands and the right to be governor of all the lands he claimed for Spain. The court cases continued (with Columbus’s descendants) until 1790.

Was Columbus a hero? To many people, he is, and we celebrate Columbus Day each year as a federal holiday.

Christopher Columbus was a trader who thought a new route to Asia would bring him wealth from the spice trade. Instead, he stumbled onto a whole new part of the world that Europeans didn’t know about (though Lief Ericson had visited North America earlier). Since there were people already living in the places he visited, it doesn’t make sense to say that Columbus “discovered” the New World, and of course he never came to the land which is now the United States.

Columbus certainly was the one who opened trade between Europe and the Americas, beginning the “Columbian Exchange” which brought horses and sugar to Native Americans and tomatoes and chocolate to Europeans. It also brought new diseases to both the Old World and the New World. Columbus himself was in favor of selling the people of the New World as slaves in Europe, though he didn’t live long enough to put that plan into action. He was accused by Spanish settlers in the New World of having exaggerated the wonders of the New World, and he was accused of cruelty to the people who were already living there. He had big plans for himself and his family, but was still in the early stages of those plans when, suffering from arthritis and fighting to regain the privileges he lost in 1500, he died just fourteen years after he had set out on his first journey.

Learn more about Columbus:

• What Was Columbus Thinking? gives students an opportunity to read letters from Christopher Columbus and get more insight into his ideas and intentions.
• An Ongoing Voyage is an online version of the U.S. Library of Congress exhibit about the world in the time of Columbus.
• A video about Columbus from National Geographic Kids.