Christopher Columbus and Ship Races

Friends~I can't wait to share about our Christopher Columbus week in class!  We had the best time learning all about his travels.  

We started with a mysterious delivery of a scroll that lead us on an adventure through some landforms on our school grounds.  (The blue islands are our outside lunch tables.)

We found a box marked with a red X!  Inside was a book all about Christopher Columbus.  We read the book and watched this video.  

This is one of my favorite books about Christopher Columbus!  Give it a click to order it on Amazon!

We also wrote about his life using this awesome file from my friend Katie Knight from Teacher to the Core!  I just love her stuff and so do my kiddos!  

We made maps of the new world!  They turned out totally awesome and it was such a great connection to our mapping unit last week!

The best is yet to come!  We created these fun glyph sailor hats in class!  We added adjectives and the year Columbus sailed to the new world to our hats. The students followed my directions from the glyph to complete the rest.  

Grab a free copy of the glyph HERE! 

You can check out more Columbus fun by clicking the image below!

We also created our own ships to race to the new world!  It was so much fun.  My teammate had the idea of using foam for the boats.  It worked perfectly.  We used a toothpick and a plastic bag for the sail.  

Check out my kiddos practicing with some force and motion in the classroom.  

Then we took them outside!  My teammate and I used large baking tins from the dollar store.  We added start to one side and land to the other.  We divided our classes into groups of 4.  The groups each had a tin.  They used straws to blow their boats to the land and when they reached the land they shouted Land Ho!  It was SOOOOO much fun! 

I even got in on the races!  Thanks to our Kindergarten friends that came and cheered us on!