Lesson Plan #: CC-0010

Second Grade Lesson 2: 500 Hundred Years of Exploration

Objectives: The student will be able to:

1. recognize that people still explore today.

2. compare the explorations of Columbus and others to the astronauts of today.

Description of lesson/activity:

1. Children should brainstorm prior knowledge about modern astronauts. The teacher should record this knowledge on sentence strips to be sequenced. Current events material on shuttle missions could be shared at this time.

2. On the board or on chart paper, have the children compare what astronauts do today with what early explorers like Columbus did 500 years ago. Among the categories that the children could compare are: vehicles of exploration; instruments of navigation; foods; clothing; destinations; results of exploration.

3. As a culminating activity, children could describe or draw an exploration that might happen 500 years from now. They might use the categories listed above as part of a pre-writing activity for this.

Resource:

Matthews, Rupert. Explorer: Eyewitness Books. (New York: Knopf, 1991) (ISBN 0-679-81460-4).