Connections

I love the connections we sometimes get to make. We’ve been reading aloud a book titled The Broken Blade, a story about voyageurs who traveled from Montreal to Grand Portage in 1800. The main character is a young boy whose father got injured just before signing up with a crew for the summer’s trip, so Pierre went in his father’s place. In the chapters we read this morning, the five canoes reached Lake Superior, and as they crossed a large bay a fierce storm came up. They barely reached the shore of an island before the canoe sank.

At lunch, we often watch some educational videos online. One we watched today was from an article I came across this morning, about a shipwreck recently discovered in Lake Superior.

We watched the video, and then read a bit of the article. As we were reading, I wondered where the wreck was, so then we went to Google Maps to find Michipicoten Harbour. As we looked at the map, we started thinking it looked like the map in The Broken Blade that we had been studying this morning. We grabbed the book, and sure enough, it was the same bay! What fun.

By the way, The Broken Blade is quite a gripping story about the voyageurs and the hard life they lived. We are really enjoying it, although there are some very graphic places, such as when they killed a deer or when one man was killed. It’s so real, you feel like you were there. We are rather upset with how the author made the one man die, and wondering why it had to be him. We’re hoping there is a good reason later on. What I loved about all this was the connections some of the children made, between the book and real life, and what’s happening today! I also loved that it was totally unplanned!

This is the map we were looking at in our book; the yellow arrow shows where the canoes got caught in the storm. As far as we can tell, they landed on the island.

Here is the Google Maps page we looked at:

And I just realized, we actually did a bit of geography today! That doesn’t happen every day.