In this unit we looked at the age of exploration which happened during and after the renaissance. This was a time where everyone was trying to find a way to Asia by boat and they instead found North and South America.

One of the first things we looked at was what were the Europeans motives to explore. Thier main  motives were: they wanted new and exotic things, the needed resources, everyone wanted fame and then wanted to spread Christianity.

Another thing we looked at was what navigational technology the Europeans had. Mainly what we looked at was that most of there navigational technology came from the renaissance. Before the renaissance they did not have the technology but the renaissance was a time of learning and sharing of knowledge. After the renaissance they had much more and more advanced technology which meant they now had the navigational technology to explore.

Then we looked at European expansionism. For this we mainly looked at why, how and where the Europeans explored and expanded to. Another thing we looked at was, the more land a country had found and conqeured and the more trade routes a country controlled, the more powerful and more famous they became.

After that we looked at what the Europeans called the New and the Old World. We looked at this because it wasn’t really the old and the new world, there had been people living on it for a long long time before the Europeans arrived. The only people the new world was new to was the Europeans.

Next we looked at the middle passage. the middle passage was one of the main routes for slave trade. For this we did an activity where we looked at a bunch of different sources the sources were: a Portuguese textbook, a slave ship captain, a slave ship doctor, a slave ship diagram and the autobiography of a former slave. After looking at them we decided which two sources were the most reliable. We chose the slave ship doctor and the slave ship captain. We thought they where the most reliable because they where both there on the ship, also each had their own point of view.

During all of this we were also doing a novel study but this was a special novel study because for this  novel study we were reading comics. This is how it worked each group got a different type of comics the types were: superhero, antihero, new age and TinTin. There were four comics in each type. We read one type a week and then we rotated.

These were the comics:

After we had read the comics we had to make our own comics. For this we were going to write a comic about and adventure we’d gone on with an explorer. We needed an explorer so we picked explorers, my explorer was Amerigo Vespucci. After we had done some research on our explorers and the Voyages and learned how to make a comic we made our comics.

Heres my comic:

For the final thing in this project we were going to present to the King/Queen (our teacher) a pitch to get them to fund us (our characters from our comics) to lead our own expedition.

Here is my presentation: