Book Description

While all kids know something about Christopher Columbus, few know the full story of this amazing, resourceful, and tragic man of history. Christopher Columbus and the Age of Exploration for Kids takes a comprehensive, nuanced, and inclusive approach to Columbus, placing him in the context of the explorations that came before, during, and after his lifetime and portraying the “Admiral of the Ocean Seas” neither as hero nor heel but as a flawed and complex man whose significance is undeniably monumental. Providing kids, parents, and teachers with a fuller picture of the seafaring life and the dangers and thrills of exploration, the book details all four of Columbus’s voyages to the New World, not just his first, and describes the year that Columbus spent stranded on the island of Jamaica without hope of rescue. A full chapter is devoted to painting a more complex portrait of the indigenous peoples of the New World and another to the consequences of Columbus’s voyages—the exchange of diseases, ideas, crops, and populations between the New World and the Old. Engaging crosscurricular activities such as taking nautical measurements, simulating a hurricane, making an ancient globe, and conducting silent trade elucidate both nautical concepts introduced and the times in which Columbus lived. Ronald Reis is the technology department chair at Los Angeles Valley College and the award-winning author of sixteen nonfiction books for young adults on subjects as varied as African Americans and the Civil War and Simón Bolívar.