Mapwork

We've been doing a lot of extra mapwork lately. We're reading The Dragon and the Raven, by Henty, and he obviously assumed that everyone who would read it would be very familiar with Anglo-Saxon England! So he blithly talks about "poling their boat for 8 hours to reach Norwich, then proceeding on their journey to Croyland, making a great circuit to avoid the Danes at Thetford". He also mentions a bunch of rivers that we had no clue about as well, so finally I decided to look for a map, since none is provided in the book (that would have been a helpful idea, though!). I found some great ones after osme searching on the internet. Here is a great map showing Southern England in the ninth century. Here's another good one, this one a simpler one from a site called "socialstudies forkids.com". Isn't the internet great for finding little things like that? I certainly don't have anything with maps like that lying around the house (and I DO have a historical atlas of maps--just no maps of England at that time!). So now we're oriented as we read and can keep track of our young hero, Edmund, as he travels. Currently, their boat got blown off course, and they had to land in a fjord of Norway, and he was taken captive. We're all on the edge of our seat with anxiety, although I have a good feeling that Edmund will survive to fight another day, with a better understanding of how the Viking themselves lived at that time! As an aside, in the boys' homeschool co-op yesterday, they started on a unit study on Explorers, an area about which we have read extensively. Nathan's class studied Marco Polo, but Luke's class studied none other than the Vikings! He got in the car and told me that he already knew everything they talked about. They made cute Viking ship models out of playdoh, so when we got home, Nathan wanted to make one as well out of clay. It looks pretty good!