World Exploration Unit Study, Homeschooling on a Shoestring

World Exploration Unit Study

For centuries, most European sailors stayed close to the coast because the open ocean was a mystery. That began to change when Viking longships crossed the North Atlantic around the year 1000, and again in the 1400s and 1500s, when better ships and instruments let explorers from Portugal, Spain, England, France, and the Netherlands sail into waters no European had mapped. Between 1488 and 1522, sailors rounded Africa, reached India by sea, landed in the Americas, and sailed all the way around the globe.

This World Exploration Unit Study follows the travelers and navigators who changed the map, from Leif Erikson and Marco Polo to Zheng He, Columbus, Magellan, and the French explorers of the Great Lakes. Children learn how sailors found their way with the stars, a compass, and a log line, and they think about how these voyages changed life for the people already living in the lands that were “discovered.” A globe, library books, and a few kitchen supplies are all you need.

Table of Contents show

Learning Objectives

Many parents and teachers will need to create their own goals. You can compare the goals at these sites to create your own goals depending on how stringent your requirements need to be. All links have several suggested activities for different ages.

Suggested Curriculum Standards:

  • Explain why people in the 1400s and 1500s wanted a sea route to Asia, including the trade in spices, silk, and gold.
  • Name major explorers, the countries that paid for their voyages, and the places they reached.
  • Trace the routes of Erikson, Polo, Zheng He, Dias, Columbus, da Gama, Magellan, and Cartier on a world map.
  • Describe how sailors used the compass, astrolabe, cross-staff, log line, and dead reckoning to navigate.
  • Learn about the ships of the era, such as the longship, junk, caravel, and carrack.
  • Think about how exploration affected Indigenous peoples through trade, disease, conquest, and the exchange of plants and animals.
  • Learn how French explorers and missionaries traveled the Great Lakes and what they found in Michigan.
  • Compare exploration in the past with exploration of the deep ocean and space today.

Timeline

Add these dates to a timeline of world exploration:

  • About 1000: Leif Erikson sails from Greenland and reaches a land he calls Vinland. The Viking site at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland is the earliest known European settlement in North America.
  • 1271: Marco Polo leaves Venice with his father and uncle and travels to China, where he serves Kublai Khan for about 17 years.
  • 1325: Ibn Battuta leaves Morocco on a journey that lasts nearly 30 years and takes him across Africa, the Middle East, India, and China.
  • 1405 to 1433: Admiral Zheng He leads seven voyages with huge Chinese treasure fleets to Southeast Asia, India, Arabia, and East Africa.
  • 1488: Bartolomeu Dias sails around the southern tip of Africa, later named the Cape of Good Hope.
  • 1492: Christopher Columbus crosses the Atlantic with the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María and lands in the Bahamas on October 12.
  • 1497: John Cabot reaches Newfoundland for England.
  • 1498: Vasco da Gama arrives in India, opening a sea route from Europe to Asia.
  • 1500: Pedro Álvares Cabral lands in Brazil and claims it for Portugal.
  • 1513: Vasco Núñez de Balboa crosses Panama and becomes the first European to see the Pacific Ocean from the Americas.
  • 1519 to 1522: Ferdinand Magellan’s fleet sails around the world. Magellan dies in the Philippines in 1521, and Juan Sebastián Elcano brings the last ship, the Victoria, home with 18 survivors.
  • 1534: Jacques Cartier explores the Gulf of St. Lawrence for France.
  • 1608: Samuel de Champlain founds Quebec.
  • 1609: Henry Hudson sails up the river that now carries his name.
  • 1634: Jean Nicolet passes through the Straits of Mackinac while searching for a water route to China.
  • 1668: Father Jacques Marquette starts a mission at Sault Ste. Marie, the oldest European settlement in Michigan.
  • 1679: La Salle’s ship, the Griffon, becomes the first sailing ship on the upper Great Lakes. It disappears on its return trip and has never been found for certain.
  • 1768 to 1779: Captain James Cook makes three voyages across the Pacific and maps New Zealand and the east coast of Australia.

Vocabulary

explorer expedition voyage
navigation latitude longitude
compass astrolabe cross-staff
dead reckoning knot league
caravel carrack longship
lateen sail crow’s nest ship’s log
North Star equator strait
spice trade colony circumnavigate
Indigenous Columbian Exchange cartographer

Book Resources

Poetry and Music

  • Sailors sang sea shanties to keep time while they hauled ropes and turned the capstan. Listen to a few, then make up your own verse about a long voyage.
  • Read “Columbus” by Joaquin Miller, the poem with the line “Sail on! sail on! and on!” Talk about what the poet admired, then discuss what the voyage meant to the Taíno people who met Columbus.
  • Write a short poem from the point of view of the North Star, a compass, or a ship’s cat.

Videos

After watching, trace the route from the video on a globe with a piece of yarn and figure out how far the explorers traveled.

Activities

  • Explorer’s Logbook: Pretend you are a sailor on a real voyage. Write a dated journal entry for each day of the unit about the weather, the food, the work, and what you see.
  • Route Map: On a world map, trace each explorer’s route in a different color. Add a legend with the explorer’s name, the country that paid for the voyage, and the year.
  • Compare Two Explorers: Use a Venn diagram to compare two explorers, such as Zheng He and Columbus, or compare exploration then with ocean or space exploration today.
  • Find Latitude with the North Star: On a clear night, find the Big Dipper and follow the two stars at the end of its cup to Polaris. Measure the height of Polaris above the horizon with the homemade quadrant from the craft list. That angle is close to your latitude.
  • Dead Reckoning Walk: Blindfold a navigator and let them give directions by compass heading and number of steps only. Mark where you end up and see how close you came to the goal.
  • Knots and Speed: Tie knots in a long string every few feet. Have one person walk while another lets the string out for 30 seconds, then count the knots. This is how sailors measured speed with a log line.
  • Spice Trade Sniff Test: Set out small dishes of cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, black pepper, and ginger. Find where each one grows on a map and talk about why Europeans paid so much for them.
  • Sink or Float: Test objects from around the house in a tub of water, then build a small boat from foil and see how many pennies it can hold before it sinks.
  • Columbian Exchange Chart: Make two columns, one for foods and animals that traveled from the Americas to Europe, Africa, and Asia (corn, potatoes, tomatoes, cocoa) and one for those that traveled the other way (horses, wheat, cattle, sugar cane).
  • Older Students: Write an essay answering the question “Why do people explore?” using examples from the voyages in this unit and from modern ocean and space missions.

Games

Use these ideas to turn key concepts from this unit into creative, engaging games your learners will love.

Game Board Blanks
Create your own themed games for this unit using printable templates and inspiration from the sites below:

  • Who Am I?: One player gives clues about an explorer, starting with the hardest clue first, until someone guesses the name.
  • Treasure Map Hunt: Draw a map of your house or yard with a compass rose. Write directions like “10 steps north, then 5 steps east” and hide a small prize at the end.
  • Race to the Spice Islands Board Game: On a file folder, draw a route from Portugal down the coast of Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, and across the Indian Ocean. Add spaces like “Scurvy strikes the crew. Lose a turn” and “Trade winds fill the sails. Move ahead 3.” Players roll a die and answer a question card to move.
  • Explorer Bingo: Fill bingo cards with explorers’ names, ships, and places. Call out a clue, such as “first to sail around Africa’s southern tip,” and players cover the matching square.

Neverending Card Deck

Use the Neverending Card Deck card and box templates to make your own sets. You can flip the card template to print your custom design on the back. Free clipart works great for themed backs or matching your card box. These cards can be used in both card games and board games.

Explorer Match Card Game

Make sets of four cards for each explorer: one with the explorer’s name, one with the country that paid for the voyage, one with the year, and one with the place reached or the main accomplishment. For example: Vasco da Gama, Portugal, 1498, reached India by sea. Make sets for at least eight explorers, such as Leif Erikson, Marco Polo, Zheng He, Bartolomeu Dias, Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, Ferdinand Magellan, and Jacques Cartier. Deal five cards to each player and play like Go Fish, asking for cards that belong to an explorer you are collecting. When you have all four cards for one explorer, lay them down and read them aloud. The player with the most complete sets wins.

The cards also work as question cards for the Race to the Spice Islands board game and the other homemade board games in this unit.

GeoSafari Cards

Using the GeoSafari Instruction Guide, you can create a wide variety of custom cards for this unit. GeoSafari is especially great for independent learning and long car trips!

Donna Young shows you how to make GeoSafari Cards

DIY Card Ideas

  • Timeline event ↔ date matching cards
  • True or false review questions
  • Vocabulary words ↔ real-life images
  • Chapter-based quizzes or review sets

GeoSafari Card Ideas

  • Explorer Routes: Match each route on a world map to the explorer who sailed it.
  • Explorers and Countries: Match each explorer to the country that paid for the voyage.
  • Navigation Tools: Match pictures of the compass, astrolabe, cross-staff, quadrant, and hourglass to their names and uses.
  • Oceans, Capes, and Straits: Locate the Cape of Good Hope, the Strait of Magellan, the Strait of Gibraltar, and the five oceans.
  • Exploration Timeline: Match each voyage to its year.
  • Great Lakes Explorers: Locate Sault Ste. Marie, St. Ignace, the Straits of Mackinac, and Quebec.

Recipes

Sailors on long voyages lived on ship’s biscuit, a hard, dry cracker that would not spoil for months. Make a gluten-free version and see how long it keeps, then pack an explorer’s lunch to eat on your field trip.

Gluten-Free Ship’s Biscuit

  • 2 cups gluten-free 1-to-1 flour blend (one that already has xanthan gum in it)
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • About 2/3 cup water

Heat the oven to 375°F. Stir the flour blend and salt together, then add the water a little at a time until a stiff dough forms. Pat or roll it about 1/2 inch thick on a sheet of parchment paper and cut it into 3-inch squares. Poke each square several times with a fork or a clean chopstick. Bake for 25 minutes, flip the squares, and bake another 20 to 25 minutes until dry and lightly browned. Let them cool on a rack. Gluten-free biscuits will be a little more crumbly than the real thing. Sailors often softened theirs by dunking them in soup or coffee, so try yours dipped in warm broth.

Explorer’s Lunch: Pack gluten-free beef jerky, cheese, raisins, dried apples, nuts, and a few of your ship’s biscuits with honey. Jerky and cheese can contain hidden gluten, so choose ones labeled gluten-free.

Field Trips

  • Visit Colonial Michilimackinac in Mackinaw City, a rebuilt French and British fort and fur trading village on the Straits of Mackinac.
  • Stop at the Father Marquette National Memorial in St. Ignace to learn about Marquette and the French explorers of the Great Lakes.
  • Go to a planetarium or join a local astronomy club’s star party to learn the stars sailors used to navigate.
  • Tour a tall ship when one visits a Great Lakes port, or visit a maritime museum near you.
  • If your family travels east, The Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia, has ship models, instruments, and maps from the age of exploration.

Art and Craft Ideas

  • Homemade Compass: Rub a sewing needle on a magnet about 30 times in one direction. Push it through a small piece of cork, foam, or a bottle cap and float it in a bowl of water. It will turn to point north.
  • Cardboard Quadrant: Draw a quarter circle on cardboard from a cereal box and mark it from 0 to 90 degrees with a protractor. Tape a straw along one straight edge and hang a string with a washer or button from the corner. Sight a star or the top of a tree through the straw and read the angle where the string crosses.
  • Aged Treasure Map: Draw a map on plain paper, crumple it, and dab it with cold tea or coffee. Let it dry and tear the edges. Add a compass rose and sea creatures like the old mapmakers did.
  • Ship Models: Build a Viking longship, a caravel, or a Chinese junk from a milk carton, a plastic bottle, or a block of scrap wood, with paper sails and a craft stick or pencil mast.
  • Spice Mosaic: Draw a simple design on cardboard, brush on glue one section at a time, and fill each section with a different spice, dried bean, or seed.
  • Columbus’s Three Ships: Draw or paint the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María, and label the masts, sails, and crow’s nest.

Information Web Resources

Worksheets

Make your own worksheets with these worksheet creation tools:

  • SchoolHouseTech https://www.schoolhousetech.com/ This company gives away two free software worksheet factories one for Basic math and one for wordsearch utility that will make wonderful complements to this unit when you include the clipart listed in the clipart section.
  • Start Write – This program makes nice reports and handwriting worksheets for the unit. https://www.startwrite.com/
  • TeachNology has several online worksheet makers and a ton of Rubric makers. Rubrics work great with Homeschool Tracker because they give you total points and you count up exactly how many points your child gets. https://www.teach-nology.com/worksheets/
  • Online Crossword Puzzle Maker to use with your vocabulary words or locations or even dates from the timeline. https://www.happychild.org.uk/wks/english/ssm/crosswords01.htm

Lapbook Ideas

  • Explorer Flap Book: A flap for each explorer with his country, dates, and route underneath.
  • Navigation Tools Pocket: Small cards with drawings of the compass, astrolabe, cross-staff, log line, and hourglass.
  • Route Map: A folded world map with each voyage traced in color.
  • Ships of Exploration: A tab book comparing the longship, junk, caravel, and carrack.
  • Columbian Exchange Wheel: Foods and animals that crossed the ocean in each direction.
  • Great Lakes Explorers Mini-Book: Nicolet, Marquette, and La Salle in Michigan.
  • Timeline Strip: A fold-out strip with the dates from the timeline above.
  • Vocabulary Matchbook: Each vocabulary word outside and its definition inside.

Evaluation Ideas

Assemble a three ring binder and please include:

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Last Updated on November 2, 2026 by Jodi