Crossing the Empty Quarter Education Pack - Lesson:Famous Explorers
Lesson Summary:
Students will be introduced to a wider range of ‘famous explorers’ and conduct further research regarding their achievements.
Students will use teamwork to prepare and present a presentation. Higher-level students will demonstrate an ability to respond to feedback, to improve their performance.
RESOURCES
Internet and computer lab
Printer
A4 paper
Lesson Plan: Social StudiesGrade / Period / Date / Class
Teaching Topic: Charting the unknown
To be aware of the achievements of famous explorers and consider how their example has helped mankind’s progress.
To understand the importance of developing effective habits in order to build character. / Learning objectives
(Maximum of three)
Students are familiar with a range of famous explorers and their achievements.
Students can work in groups to agree on the achievements and admirable qualities of successful explorers. / Success criteria
(Maximum of three)
Thinking Skills
- Slide 13: Identify where the picture comes from. 2. Elicit/teach that the desire to push the boundaries continues into space exploration today. E.g. Pluto appears beyond our ability now. Once, travelling to America represented the same level of challenge. 3. Ask: Who discovered America?
Introducing famous explorers
1. Use the presentation to introduce famous explorers from the past and the key factors that contributed to the ‘Age of Exploration’. 2. Worksheet 1: Match the explorer to their terrain. 3. Elicit information about these explorers and/or the significance of their journeys.
Research skills 1: Scanning
1. Prepare a short presentation about ONE explorer’s achievements.Refer back to the common characteristics ofexplorers, identified on the previous lesson. Groups agree on ONE characteristic for their explorer and explain how their achievements have demonstrated this as part of the presentation. Use the internet to conduct research. 2. Explain the presentation review criteria to the class in terms of an allocation of marks to four aspects of the presentation: a. Coverage of the content. b. Strength of the case made for a particular characteristic. c. Confidence and clarity of delivery. d. Collaboration – working as a group.
Presentations
1. Each group presents to the class. 2. Class provides feedback against the success criteria. 3. Teacher reviews the activity and provides feedback on how they performed as a group, and ways in which they have illustrated some of the same qualities that can be admired in famous explorers. / Main Activities / Applying – using ideas of static electricity in a new way
Creating – putting forward a theory
1. Use the presentations to review the answers to the question: “Who discovered America? Ref:
2. Return to slide 15. Consider the routes taken by the ‘famous explorers’.
3. Elicit/teach that the ability to travel accurately in straights lines away from a coastlineled to the new age of exploration, and this had been ‘learnt previously by Ahmad ibn Majid who passed on this technology to Vasco De Gama. (See teaching materials.)
4. Discuss the reality of ‘discovery’ and records of ‘discovery’, against the fact that people were already living in many of these places. Many achievements have gone unrecorded, or were simply handed down to us via stories, legends and fairy tales; the voyages of Sinbad for example.
5. Slides 24 and 25: Elicit/explain that these adventurers would not have been able to achieve what they had done without the generous support and knowledge of locals already there. / Plenary / Applying – to new situations
Worksheet 1:
Match the following explorers with their correct ‘terrain’:
Bertram Thomas / Mt EverestIbn Battuta / Seas of Asia
Neil Armstrong / The Ocean
Edmund Hilary / The Islamic world
Lief Ericson / Rub Al Khali
Zheng He / Greenland
Captain Cook / The Polar regions
Christopher Columbus / The American continents
Jaques Cousteau / The Moon
David Livingstone / The source of the Nile
Roald Amundsen / Australia
Sample Biography Card1: Neil Armstrong
Reference:
Born:Aug 5, 1930 in Wapakoneta, Ohio, U.S. /Died:Aug 25, 2012 (at age 82) in Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.
Nationality:American
Field:Naval aviator, test pilot
Famous For:Landing on the Moon
Awards:Presidential Medal of Freedom, Congressional Space Medal of Honor
Ahmad ibn Majid
Reference source:
He it is who appointed the stars to you, that you might guide yourselves by them through the darkness of land and sea.
–The Qur’an, Sura VI, verse 97.
Image: N Mcdonald
Ahmad ibn Majid was born in Oman, probably in 1432, the year Zheng He’s junks docked at Jiddah. The last of his approximately 40 known compositions, a poem on the heavens, is dated 1500, the same year Pedro Álvares Cabral discovered Brazil on his way to India by way of the Cape of Good Hope—thus linking Europe, the New World, Africa and Asia in a single voyage. Ibn Majid must have died soon after that date, his life spanning the most critical century in the history of the ocean whose currents, winds, reefs, shoals, headlands, harbors, seamarks and stars he spent a lifetime studying.
His most important work wasKitab al-Fawa’id fi Usul ‘Ilm al-Bahr wa ’l-Qawa’id (Book of Useful Information on the Principles and Rules of Navigation), written in 1490. It is an encyclopedia of navigational lore: the history and basic principles of navigation, lunar mansions, rhumb lines, the difference between coastal and open-sea sailing, the locations of ports from East Africa to Indonesia, star positions, accounts of the monsoon and other seasonal winds, typhoons and other topics for professional navigators. He drew from his own experience and that of his father, also a famous navigator, and the lore of generations of Indian Ocean sailors.
TheBook of Useful Informationdeals not only with the monsoon system, but also with the finer details of local wind regimes. The prevailing winds in the Red Sea north of Jiddah were among the most difficult, Ibn Majid writes, because they blew from the north all year round. Normal practice was to sail to Jiddah and there either transfer cargo to smaller boats, whose pilots were experienced in the local conditions between Jiddah and Suez, or to send car- goes overland. Even to Jiddah, and to ‘Aydhab on the Egyptian side, access was only possible during the northeast monsoon, between October and mid-March. Other specialized knowledge was needed to sail elsewhere: south of the equator, for example, where the monsoons gave way to the trade winds. The China Sea too had its own wind regime. Only a lifetime of sailing could teach amu‘allim, or master navigator, the skills upon which the entire trading network depended.