Learning about Captain Cook

This week we have been reading a difficult text about Captain Cook -

Captain Cook Charting Our Islands by Melanie Lovell-Smith

School Journal Level 4, May 2016


Each day we annotated the text given to us (1-2 pages per day) and we talked about the words we didn't know or understand. Here are the words we learnt.


New words from Monday (page 28-29)

Transit - movement

Endeavour - the name of Cook’s ship.

Continent - a big landmass with lots of countries in it

Landmass - piece of land

Turanganui-a-kiwa - a place near Gisborne

Observing - watching

Tahiti - the island of Tahiti, a place

South -

Rare - something special

Predictable - you know when it’s going to happen or what is going to happen

Occur - happened

Pairs - two things together

Astronomer - a person who studies astrology (root word is astro)

Century - 100 years

Accurately - doing something correctly and carefully

Inaccurate - doing something wrong

Various - different

Then each student had to think of a question and find the answers either in the text or use Google to find it out.




Pages 30-31 - Tuesday

Sounding - a way to chart land

Anchor - a heavy thing that stops boats from drifting away

Fathom - 1.8m

Coastal profiles -

Wounded -

Translator -

Dispute -

Cross-cultural communication -

Conflict -

Essential information -

Aground -

Overboard -

Tallow -

We did the same thing again where each student had a question to answer about these two pages.



Pages 32 & 33 - Wednesday

Instructed - told

Chart - make a map of something

Enormous - big, massive, giant

Unfamiliar - something you don’t know

coastline - the line where the water meets land

Surveying - the process to make a map

Prominent - big, important, significant

Plotted - put onto the map

Sketched - to draw something

Crucial - critical, important, essential

Horizon - where the land and sky meet

Quadrant - (root word is quad which means 4) - something with 4 parts

Occasionally - sometimes, infrequently

Precise - clear, accurate

Greenwich - a place in London

Voyage - journey

Lunar - moon


Pages 34-37 - Thursday

Course

Shallow

Inlet

Circumnavigate

Territory

Shipwrecked

Repairs

Timber

Convert

British Empire


Next we made a summary of the story


Captain James Cook set sail from Britain in August 1768 heading to Tahiti.

He took scientists to Tahiti so they could observe the transit of Venus. Afterwards, he went to New Zealand. This voyage took three months and then the crew spent circumnavigating New Zealand and charting the coastline.

They measured water depth by using a lead weight with tags on it indicating 1 fathom (1.8m). They also sketched the coastal profile (the beachline).


They measured the distances between prominent landmarks and the ship, the distances between the horizon and the sun, and the angles between the sun, moon and stars. Longitude measures vertical distances around the Earth and latitude measures horizontal distances from the equator.

Captain Cook sailed to Australia and claimed it as British territory. Then he charted 3,219km of Australian coastline. He took 6 weeks to repair his ship Endeavour. He arrived home in Britain in July 1771.

He visited New Zealand two more times in the next several years before being killed in Hawaii in 1779.


On Friday we reviewed all the words we learnt on Monday-Thursday and tried to make sentences out of them. 

The bold words were from the new words list.Sentences

Litia - Captain Cook was instructed to sketch an enormous chart.

Wesley - In the 18th century the British wanted to expand their territory so they began surveying the South to find a rare continent.


Ana - Captain Cook and his ship named Endeavour went for a wonderful voyage from the British Empire to Tahiti then they had a dispute and conflict erupted.

Ana - accurately measured the distance between the horizon and then plotted the prominent landmarks.