Learning With My Great Grandson

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When I was confined to my house, not being able to drive, following my cataract surgery, a few months ago, I was looking after my great grandson, so that my daughter, who has legal custody of this grandson, could get some things done that she needed to do. Since he is home schooled, I helped him with some of his lessons and he has this workbook with such interesting things to learn. It’s mostly about VOCABULARY, but each lesson also involved solving a trivia question. Well, as you know by now, that is right up my alley, so I enjoyed the lessons. As he matched the words with their definitions, he had to take the letter assigned to the definition and fill in the puzzle at the bottom of the page, which spelled out the answer to the trivia question. One of the answers was B A R T O L O M E U D I A S. (there are no spaces in the answer, so it was not easy to figure out what it was spelling) I didn’t recognize that name, but the question was: Who was the first explorer to sail around the Cape of Good Hope? So, I looked it up. Bartolomeu Dias was a Portuguese explorer who was born around 1450 and died on his last voyage in 1500. Nothing was known about his early life at all, but the king of Portugal asked him to find out if it was possible to sail around Africa and reach India. So, in 1487, Dias sailed down the African coastline and then his ships were blown out to sea where he stayed for 13 days. Finally, he made his way back and sailed north and found land to his left and an open route to India. He also sailed on two more voyages in the Indian Ocean with Vasco de Gama in 1497 and with Pedro Cabral in 1500 where he was lost at sea rounding the cape. The storms and high winds of that area have long been a problem for ships. So, I was able to learn along with my great grandson. There were many other trivia questions, that we discussed together, so it was fun to help him with his lessons. These lessons, I think, could be made into a FUN game for kids.