Captain Cook - A Brief History Of Australia

Did you see my introductory post on our Brief History Of Australia Unit? If not you might want to go visit that one first.

We've moved forward a considerable amount of time and are now looking at Captain Cook.

Please note, this is not an exhaustive covering of Australian History, there will be many things left out. This is deliberate for a few reasons.

Firstly I have prepared this to work with our micro school and needed to fit in with our term blocks. Secondly, I wanted to use picture books and therefore most of what I chose has been based on the books I was able to access. Finally, this is purely just an introduction into the history of our nation, these kids have plenty of years ahead of them where they will spend time delving deeper.

Of course you could use these ideas simply as a jumping off point, there is no need to have to finish each topic with a single one hour lesson block.

Captain Cook is such an easy topic when it comes to book choices, there really a good number of picture books out there, for varying age levels. The one I chose is a longer more in depth look at the man himself.

Whilst I read the kids water coloured their timeline page of Captain Cook. You can download this for free via the link at the bottom of this post.

After watching a brief you tube clip we headed off to complete the corresponding art activity I had planned - mapping Cook's expedition to Australia.

I had outlined a map each for them onto brown paper, simply because I knew our time was limited. We wanted the maps to have an aged feel and everyone certainly enjoyed scrunching the maps up to give them that.

They set about adding water colours to their maps. During the drying time we briefly looked at the Compass Rose, discussed compass points and made our own simple one to place onto our map.

Once they were dry we added, first in pencil, the route Captain Cook took on his voyage to Australia. These turned out fabulously well. The kids were all very proud of their maps.

Once again, after all of our discussions were complete each child coloured and added some notes inside their mini Captain Cook booklet, in preparation to add to their lapbook.

Would you like a copy of the A4 Timeline Colouring Page for Captain Cook? Please use this link to download one for your personal use.

Other posts in the Brief History Of Australia Series

• The First Australians

Happy Homeschooling
Kylie

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