David Livingstone

Lesson Plan - Get It!

Audio:

Imagine this: You walk through the jungle and come upon a clearing where you find people.

That would normally be a great sight, especially after days and weeks of loneliness and danger. The problem is that you don’t know who these people are. They wear strange clothing. They have different customs that you don’t know or understand. They are speaking a language that you never heard before.

• What do you do?

You could just Google it and find out who they are and what travel tips might help you out — but the internet won’t be invented for another century.

This was what it meant to be an explorer in the 1800s. The brave explorers of the 1800s mapped much of the world, often without any prior knowledge of the places or people they would find out there.

Sometimes, they came to love the cultures and people they found so much that they almost became one of them. Other times, they used the people or places they found only to make themselves rich and famous.

Learn about some of the great explorers of the 1800s.

Take a look at Explorers from the 1800s: The 19th Century and make note of three or four of the most interesting of the explorers you find. Look for answers to these questions.

• Where did they travel?
• What were their reasons for traveling?
• What did they accomplish?

After you collect your information, consider these questions.

• With which of these explorers would you like to have traveled? Why?
• What kind of people do you think they were?
• How has the value of travel changed since these times?

When you examine the lives of these explorers more closely, you find that each of them had important traits. They had traits like curiosity, patience, conviction, and lots and lots of courage.

In the Got It? section, examine the life of one of these explorers, David Livingstone.