Leif Ericson and The Great Golden Age

Think back to your family history. A long time ago, did one of your ancestors live in a different country? Or maybe a whole other continent? If so, how did you get here? This is a question that's been running on from generation to generation. Now we have the answer thanks to the explorers: people who dedicate themselves to finding the answer and discovering new places, finding new civilizations and food, and making a new, livable place for people out of their over-crowded cities.

Many people have heard of explorers. I know I learned about my first explorer in Kindergarten. It was Christopher Columbus. However, we're going farther back, to the time of the Vikings. In fact, the explorer we'll be focusing on was a Viking. His name was Leif Ericson, son of Eric the Red.

I had never heard about Leif Ericson until I got into this class at Eagleridge called The Golden Age of Exploration. In this class, we play games and do group projects to help us learn about the explorers. The project I am working on presently is were you create a report on one of the early explorers. We were told to make a group of two so I grouped up with my friend Katie who I did my last project with, mapping out were Ferdinand Magellan and his crew would stop to get food and what food they got there. We chose to learn about Leif Ericson. Since the class is only an hour long, and we were going nowhere from reading a book, we agreed to search our facts at home and combine our facts together the next time we met.

Over the past few days, I have collected lots of facts on Leif Ericson. I took my collected facts and turned them into a four-paged fact paper. Some of the things I've learned are:

• Leif Ericson was a Norse explorer thought to be the first to land in North America
• He was born around 970 C.E. in Iceland, son of Eric the Red
• Leif's mother, Thjodhild, had three sons, Leif, Thorvald, and Thorstein, and a daughter, Freydis
• The main sources of Icelandic legends are the Saga of Eric the Red and the Saga of Greenlanders
• Leif Ericson died in about 1020 C.E.
  

I also learned many other things, but then this blog would become a book if I added them all and I don't want sore fingers. This is one of the great things about homeschooling is that if you find an interesting subject, you have plenty of time to research it. If you would like to learn more about Leif Ericson go to: http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Leif_Ericson
I got all my facts on Leif Ericson on this website.