Christopher Columbus discovered. . .

the Bahamas (according to my students).  I think I have some more work to do!

Since Columbus Day was on Monday, I thought I would teach my kiddos a little bit about the man behind the holiday.  Whenever they have the day off I feel obligated to explain the holiday that has created this joyous occasion.

It was difficult to find books on the topic, but I managed to find a couple.  

I read these and discussed them with the kiddos.  I also taught them a couple of songs to help them remember the information.  I can't take the credit for these.  I found them online at Teaching Kids 1st and just copied them on to chart paper.

I was also lucky enough to get some free Scholastic News in the mail, one of which happened to be about Christopher Columbus!  It even included a couple of worksheets to extend and assess learning.

I only gave this page to my first graders.  

This one was for all my K/1 kiddos.  They had trouble with #4.  We will have to talk more about that.

I found some great free worksheets on TeacherspayTeachers to incorporate math and phonics as well.  

We have been working on word problems, so this one was perfect!  Thank you to Growing Firsties.

 Thank you to Practice Makes Perfect for these two math pages.

I put these pages in centers.  The kinders did the color by letter and the firsties did the other pages. 

Thanks to iHeartLiteracy for this one!

Thanks to Creatively Crazy in First Grade.

This was great to help them build sentences, work on handwriting, and work on using capitals and punctuation.  Thanks to Christina Mauro.

The kiddos also got to do some writing.  They wrote about where they would like to explore.  I forgot to take pictures of their notebooks.  Some of them were pretty entertaining!  To give you an idea, here are a few of the places they wrote about:

• Fairyland
• a person's mouth
• under the sea
• Mexico
• a carnival

After a week's worth of learning about Columbus, they still get some of the information confused.  However, they have a basic understanding of who Columbus was and what he did.  In all fairness, they probably know just as much about him as some adults.  Now we are on to more important things like, pumpkins and Halloween!  They could rave about these topics all day long!