Explorer Study: Ibn Battuta

I particularly wanted to study the Islamic, medieval explorer Ibn Battuta.  Being a contemporary of Marco Polo, who we had studied at the beginning of the year, I felt a comparison study would be quite interesting.  Both travelled widely throughout the Eastern Medieval world; both met with similar tribes and peoples; and most importantly both wrote about it.  However, they came from different vantage points thanks to their religions.  What we had available to us was two pieces of primary evidence, written by the actual person during his life time, and written during a similar time period in history.  It was perfect!  We had already read about Marco Polo’s travels and carried out an fairly extensive study on him, the silk road and the Mongols:

As this would be a fairly short study, due to the fact that I do actually someday want to move past the crusades (!), they perused Wikipedia and watched the following video:

And then used this amazing picture book as our starting point:

This is a seriously informative and imaginatively illustrated book which really captured the Islamic influences of the time.  It contains Battuta’s own words and although it is obviously not his full works, it was good enough for our study:

As a quick revision and to check they had taken everything on board I set them the quiz, found here.  As we do comprehension exercises so infrequently, they were quite excited by the prospect!

I also asked them to write a quick paragraph about Battuta:

I had the children make up a very quick and simple map, adding details to it each day, from an old used, paper table-cloth.  A nice frugal way to envision exactly the route he took.  I drew an outline map of the world.  I gave the children the freedom to label any country or sea they recognised.  I wanted to test their knowledge of world geography, given I really do not do enough specific geography and kind of hope they learn what they need to vicariously through their other studies:

After painting the sea blue, the children (using the map at the back of the above book) mapped out Battuta’s route using some wool.  This activity not only consolidated Battuta’s travels and route for the children but also gave them practice transferring information from one map to another:

The children also retraced Marco Polo’s steps in a completely different colour, adding to the key.  It was also such an easy method to add Marco Polo’s journey by simply copy off our previous map we had made during our Marco Polo studies:

Thus a comparison could easily be seen:

The children read this and this.  To make the comparison study simpler for them, I also sourced the comparative passages from the two original books and made photocopies of the passages I wanted them to compare.

I photocopied Jimmie’s comparison note pages (free) for the children to fill in, as and when they came across similarities and differences between the two explorers.  I chose these particular Venn diagram type comparison note pages because I am teaching L11 Venn diagrams and groupings in her maths and I thought it tied in nicely:

I kept this study simple and mainly verbal.  It was, nonetheless, a useful exercise comparing the two using their very own written evidence, but coming from two very different points of view culturally speaking.

In my own research I came across these maps, information and questions.  I always like the idea of incorporating a bit more maths and the following lesson, linking geography, maths and a nice comparison of both travellers, fit in rather nicely.  That said, it was unfamiliar maths and all of us (including me) found it stretching!  But we did it and I think learnt something from it.  Mapping and calculating distances and then converting them between miles and kilometres made me remember why we might avoid geography.  I’m rarely bored but I was definitely heading in that direction:

All in all, this was a really good study, employing work carried out previously.  The past year or so I can really see the benefit to studying history deeply and in chronological order.  In so many cases one event or person in history is intrinsically linked to another.  Having some knowledge of the people who went before those we are currently studying is so helpful and gives us a really rounded picture of the history of this world.

As you can probably guess, geography wouldn’t be a strength of mine, a fact which will be rectified during the next couple of years when we look in-depth at the explorative age, covering all the well known explorers.  Maybe then I’ll be able to find my way around a map better than my 11 year old girls!