I’m a first year 8th grade history teacher and the curriculum wants me to spend a day on Vikings. Given a day, what would you want to see covered? Nothing too in depth because I only have one 50 minute period to really discuss. Any cool ideas for an activity? I was considering having them for half the class design their own Viking warrior with classes/traits weapon descriptions. Open to all ideas and topics
>I'm a teacher
>coming to IQfy for advice
I value anonymous inputs from people who have enough interest to visit a board dedicated to the study of history. I won’t necessarily integrate anything mentioned here but I’m always open to ideas from anyone and anything— even my own students
>a board dedicated to the study of history
Oh is that what you see going on in these threads, huh
yeah, those who don't study history are literal homosex, that's why his is full of homosexuals
Religion is generally of interest to most people. ie 'cool' Gods, say Thor, Odin etc. You could focus on writing like runes, if it's basically just a one hour workshop you could have a 20 minute introduction and the rest an activity of sorts.
Yes this is kind of where my heads at, cover Norse mythology and major figures (Erik the red, Leif Erikson, Ragnor) and then mythos. Then Friday I think I’ll dedicate more time to the siege in Paris
when you discuss Norse mythology & religion, don't forget to give some caveats, such as the full breadth of Norse religious practices being murky due to a lack of source material - and then a rough overview of the sources we do have. maybe cite from a chapter of the Prose Edda, show your students an excerpt from the Poetic Edda, or something of that sort. it becomes more tangible that way as opposed to merely listing off the gods and their archetypes
you must show them the turd
This is hilarious. Yes definitely I will include this, maybe as part of my anticipatory set.
This idea is really cool, and they all have Chromebooks so researching the answer would be pretty easy. I could just pull up a big map at the front of the room on the projector for them to come up and mark with a dry erase marker. I’m heavily considering this one as a possibility, and if I don’t do it I’m passing it along to my colleague. Worth writing down
I've done a few things like this before, they work incredibly well. Shitloads of prep, but it has lots of replay value, and the framework can be adapted to many topics once you've internalised the mechanics.
I've never done it with Vikings, but am actually exciting to do so now, lol. I usually do it in a desert island scenario (i.e. tecahing Lord of the Flies).
I also rana project week at a summer camp where I gave different classes ancient civs and they completed challenges to influence the world map a la Diplomacy, which was incredible (mock UN summits, documentaries on their climates, building wonders out of spaghetti, etc).
Maybe the raids into Frankia and England? Great Heathen army, sack of Paris.
Choose your own adventure?
Put class into small groups which are different clans. They have to raid Europe and collect loot, as well as pleasing their gods. Another route could be to explore the Americas.
Would need:
>Big map on the board with post-it notes covering squares
>"Challenge" cards for raids
>A running score chart.
Groups choose which square they visit next (rule = they cannot go somewhere already exploited). When they visit a square they're all given challenge cards which involve researching answers "How could the vikings survive the Greenalnd climate?" or "How did Rurik subjugate the Finnic tribes aroud Novgorod?"
Getting answers correct = gold, warriors and pussy.
Diferent routes you'd want to cover would be:
>Greenland
>Britain
>Byzantium
>Rus
>Poland
You could technically use the gold to either buy "warriors" or "settlements". At the end game you could add a dynamic where you can attack each other and detroy each other's cities.
>The meta-abusing group that goes for France into England & Sicily
snorri sturluson's theory that odin was a turkish war veteran from the trojan wars, who moved to scandinavia with his tribe to settle with the natives there.
it's a wild theory, but if it wasn't for snorri we wouldn't know shit about norse culture and their myths, not to mention he proposed this before we found arrowheads in turkey that dated back to the trojan wars, he was probably on to something.
>what would you want to see covered?
something something danelaw. and also their excursions/conquests into Slavic lands that led to state building there
oh shit, I forgot, there's a literary source by some muslim dude in europe back then he descrived a Vikang(or whatever it was) burial in great detail
> Eyewitness account of an early 10th-century ship funeral by Volga Vikings by a traveller named Ahmad ibn Fadlan, from Baghdad.
this should help you find the source
Yes I definitely want to highlight that the Vikings aren’t just marvel characters, and I want to include their exchanges with other cultures. To
point about the activity I came up with being to gamified, you have to remember these are 13-14 year old kids who lost 2 years of fundamental social/academic/emotional development because of Covid. Students all across the US have record low scoring (except one study that said math scores went up during Covid in California… I bet kids would never cheat at home right?) I can really only manage to pull off half the class being information based, and the activity I usually am doing some sort of creative drawing/poster/game. They have TikTok brains and it’s going to take a while to work that out, if it ever does. In the meantime I have to get them engaged and games/creative tasks anecdotally seem work really well for that
I insist, find the source cause it's the most kino and epic movie-like scene ever, like the children must understand that back in the days shit wasn't like today, not even close, well to be fair there's sex and ritual sacrifice, but I think it is ok to reveal that to children to some degree, like our ancestors were fricking wild and all of that was neutered by romans, christcuckery and modern times
Would be fun to metion the first converted Norman ruler had around a hundred slaves sacrificed at his Christian funeral.
Are you a teacher in the USA? How old are the kids in your class?
He said Grade 8, which should be ~13-14
I just wanted to be sure.
And reading this thread in its entirety I am amazed by the amount of gamification that is now being employed in the school system in the USA - don't know how it is in my country and it was certainly not so when I was in school. Something like this
reads amazing but I doubt that it is possible to play out in a single class hour.
Anyways I would suggest to OP something like this
. Don't focus too much on the raiding part but focus more on the vikings as traders - especially in the geographic area of eastern europe/russia since those are probably not that prominent in an curriculum from the USA.
Have them in groups of 6 with 2 ranks wide and 3 files deep, assign each of these “longboat crews” a god and a destination, have them write down what weapons they’d take with them, how they would worship their god, and (you certainly have a map of the world, tell them to reference it) how they would get from Iceland to Wherever (Iran, Egypt, Byzantium, Estonia).
You should probably do this exercise with the last 15 minutes in mind, give a bit of background on the Norse gods or distribute to them a print out of the gods and some of their traits and associated myths.
A module on the viking age won't make any sense unless you lay the groundwork for why people started raiding and expanding outside of Scandinavia in the first place. Look at theories about overpopulation and lack of resources in Norway, Denmark and Sweden then divide the class into 3 parts:
- vikings as traders
- vikings as conquerors
- vikings as explorers
Start by talking about how early medieval Scandinavians didn't just appear out of nowhere, they were likely visiting a lot of places like Britain and the Baltic as traders and fishermen before they started raiding and conquering. Possible things to include:
-exploration and colonisation of Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland
-trade with Muslim caliphates, the Varangian guard
-early raids on monasteries in Ireland, Britain and France eventually becoming large scale conquering armies
-perhaps look at the legacy of 2 viking societies abroad: the adaptive Normans and the conservative Icelanders
Your activity sounds pretty lame and very uneducational. I'm sure you can find some printouts from a museum website that has a large viking collection, that's the bread and butter of a good few European museums
https://www.museum.ie/en-IE/Museums/Archaeology/Engage-And-Learn/Schools-Educational-Visits/Activity-Sheets
If your kids aren't complete morons they should be able to complete some of the activities in the viking age section here. The "decipher runic alphabet sword inscriptions" one could be more informative and engaging for both genders than "create your own DnD character"
Just show an episode of the Vikings or the Last Kingdom or something, that's what the cool teachers do. Kids aren't interested in learning.
Tell them how English is so much like Norse and that they're all speaking vikang