Christopher Columbus

One of the books that both my kids have been enjoying is their Christopher Columbus (Young Reading Level 3).

They have found the story fascinating, lots of comments about how could people have thought the earth was flat, how did they not know which continents existed, travelling on boats must have been the worst without any fridges to keep the food etc etc. They found the whole story about the voyages really exciting and loved looking at our globe to see where he went (Oh and imagine thinking that the Americas was the Indies – my son). The text of the book is at the right level for my two (my nine-year-old can easily read it herself and my six-year-old follows along in the book word for word as I read it too him).

The book is well written (nothing scary) and is filled with interesting facts about his voyages as well as maps showing each trip and lots of illustrations depicting the scenes of his voyages and life.

So when I spotted some of the new Famous people pages on Activity Village I had a quick look to see if there was anything on Christopher Columbus and there was. We love the Activity Village How to Draw pages so I immediately printed out the Christopher Columbus one and one evening while I was busy cooking both kids had a go and drawing their own Christopher Columbus.

(We are massive fans of the How to draw pages – I keep ours in a home-made drawing book and we keep it on the kids bookshelf – it is great for when one of the kids wants to try to draw something and is not sure how to get started).

We also printed out the Comprehension pages.

And my daughter loved the idea of the Captain’s Log. (She is trying really hard to work on her creative writing and thought this was a fun activity to try).

My son’s favourite page was the map of his voyages. He loves using the map to help him retell (react might be the better word) the stories of the different voyages – where they landed and what happened on each trip.

I love using the Usborne Young Reading series as a way of introducing famous people to the kids and I really like the fact that I can now link some of the books to the famous people pages on Activity Village.