Many new words entered English and other European languages as the explorers struggled to describe the new objects and animals they encountered in the Americas. Activities for vocabulary building include Jeopardy, word searches, crosswords and Bingo. You can include the new words, the names of countries and the names of explorers.
Voyages of exploration provide many opportunities for students to build map-making and map-reading skills. Have them identify important regions on a map, trace the routes of explorers such as DeSoto, Cortez and John Smith, or compare 16th century maps to 21st century ones.
Understanding chronology is an important skill, particularly for events of the distant past. Activities to help students to mark time of American exploration include time lines spanning from Columbus to Lewis and Clark, Bingo and history trees (the roots are the oldest events, the top of the tree the most recent).
If you are lucky, you can take your students a field trip to visit an historic site associated with the Age of Discovery. If this is not possible, take them to a part of the school that they don't go to (or anywhere new) and have them describe this unfamiliar environment.
Being able to communicate through the written word is a crucial skill that all students must learn. Writing activities incorporating this time period might include a biography of an explorer, writing a fan letter to the explorer of their choice, writing a letter to the editor of the local paper in support or condemnation of an explorer, writing the obituary of an explorer or writing a story that highlights the interactions between Europeans and the Native Americans.
Pretending to be an explorer will require students to investigate the life of each individual, to inhabit the world of these men and women, and to imagine how they might react to each other or to the modern world. This could be done via a class exploration blog or social media sites such as My Fake Wall, Historical Facebook and Ning.