BrightKidz Library
Subjects
A sailing ship following a route across a sea chart An old sea chart ruled into squares. On the left is an eight-pointed compass rose. A dashed route curves away from it across the chart to a sailing ship on the right, which has a tall mast, two square sails and a flag flying at the top. Wave lines run beneath the hull.

Amazing Explorers

About 5 minutes

Explorers were people who set out to map places nobody around them had ever charted — new coastlines, unknown land, and, in one case, a full route around the entire world.

Who Were Explorers?

Explorers traveled to new places, mapped what they found, and brought that knowledge home.

Famous Explorers

Whose expedition was the first to sail all the way around the world?

Explore at Home

An explorer's real job was not the sailing. It was coming home and being able to show other people what was there. That is what a map is for — and you can make one of somewhere you already know.

What you'll need

Steps

  1. Choose a place to map — your room, or the garden.
  2. Stand still and look around properly. What is actually there?
  3. Draw the shape of the room or area on your paper first, as if you were looking straight down at it from the ceiling.
  4. Draw the things inside it: your bed, the table, the door, a tree.
  5. Use different colors to label things, and write the names on.

Here is what a finished one can look like. Notice that everything is drawn from above, so a bed becomes a rectangle and a door becomes a gap with a curve showing which way it swings.

A simple hand-drawn map of a bedroom, seen from above A plan of one room looking straight down at it. The four walls are drawn as thick lines. There is a gap in the bottom wall for the door, marked with a curved line showing the way it swings open. A rectangle in the top left corner is labelled BED, a smaller rectangle at the bottom right is labelled TABLE, and a short double line in the top wall is labelled WINDOW. WINDOW DOOR BED TABLE
A bedroom mapped from above. The curve at the door shows the way it opens — a real mapping trick you can copy.

Why is Exploring Important?

Explorers helped map the world. Their journeys and written accounts brought back real descriptions of coastlines, cultures, and animals that people at home had never seen.

Try This Next

Read a book about explorers. Draw a picture of your favorite explorer's ship. Then imagine your own journey — where would you go, and what would you bring back?

The explorers above spent years at sea for one reason: to come home and show people something new. The map you just made does the very same job, on a much smaller scale.