Age of Exploration & Exchange
📋 What it is
From the 1400s, sea voyages linked continents — moving crops, goods and ideas, but also spreading disease and beginning the transatlantic slave trade.
🗣️ Coach says
This era connected the whole globe for the first time — the “Columbian Exchange” swapped potatoes, maize and horses across oceans. But be honest about the cost: it also brought devastating disease and the enslavement of millions. Real history holds both.
🧠 Memory hook
Exchange went BOTH ways — and had a heavy human cost. Crops AND consequences.
😂 Giggle
Why did the explorer bring a pencil to the New World?
In case they needed to draw their own conclusions!
😲 Whoa!
The potato, native to the Andes, travelled to Europe during this exchange and eventually became one of the most important foods on Earth.
✅ Quick check: The “Columbian Exchange” moved crops and animals across oceans. Name one serious HARM it also caused.
Say your answer out loud first — then reveal.
The spread of deadly diseases to Indigenous peoples and the growth of the transatlantic slave trade.
A complete account of exploration names both the connections AND the human costs — that’s honest history.
🧪 Try it! (2 minutes)
Name one food that crossed the ocean in this era and one harm the exchange caused.