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    N P H Who Were The Vikings?: Uffield Rimary Istory

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    Hadi Adi
    The document describes an introduction to a five-week unit on Vikings for a class of 9- and 10-year-olds. It began with asking students to write what they knew about Vikings and questions they had. This revealed both accurate knowledge, such as they sailed in longships, and misconceptions, such as Vikings wore helmets with horns. Students then generated thoughtful questions. The introduction activated students' prior knowledge and engaged them in the topic by eliciting their own questions to guide the upcoming lessons.

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    N P H Who Were The Vikings?: Uffield Rimary Istory

    Uploaded by

    Hadi Adi
    42 views3 pages
    The document describes an introduction to a five-week unit on Vikings for a class of 9- and 10-year-olds. It began with asking students to write what they knew about Vikings and questions they had. This revealed both accurate knowledge, such as they sailed in longships, and misconceptions, such as Vikings wore helmets with horns. Students then generated thoughtful questions. The introduction activated students' prior knowledge and engaged them in the topic by eliciting their own questions to guide the upcoming lessons.

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    The document describes an introduction to a five-week unit on Vikings for a class of 9- and 10-year-olds. It began with asking students to write what they knew about Vikings and questions they had. This revealed both accurate knowledge, such as they sailed in longships, and misconceptions, such as Vikings wore helmets with horns. Students then generated thoughtful questions. The introduction activated students' prior knowledge and engaged them in the topic by eliciting their own questions to guide the upcoming lessons.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    42 views3 pages

    N P H Who Were The Vikings?: Uffield Rimary Istory

    Uploaded by

    Hadi Adi
    The document describes an introduction to a five-week unit on Vikings for a class of 9- and 10-year-olds. It began with asking students to write what they knew about Vikings and questions they had. This revealed both accurate knowledge, such as they sailed in longships, and misconceptions, such as Vikings wore helmets with horns. Students then generated thoughtful questions. The introduction activated students' prior knowledge and engaged them in the topic by eliciting their own questions to guide the upcoming lessons.

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    NUFFIELD PRIMARY HISTORY

    ROMANS, ANGLO-SAXONS AND VIKINGS IN BRITAIN


    WHO WERE THE VIKINGS?

    TEACHERS’ NOTES
    Below we describe how we introduced a five-week Viking unit to a class
    of 9- and-10-year-old children. The teaching formed a twenty-minute
    starter to a two-and-a-quarter-hour lesson. We knew that the children
    would probably have prior knowledge about the Vikings, from television
    and visits to the Yorvik Viking Centre in nearby York. We wanted to
    discover the extent and nature of that knowledge: what concepts of the
    Vikings and their civilisation had the children formed in their minds?
    So we decided to begin the unit by asking the children to write down what
    they knew, then what they wanted to know, about the Vikings.
    This approach will work for any topic, at any age.
    In discussing, writing and pooling their statements the children are calling
    upon prior knowledge, clarifying ideas and concepts, and practising their
    speaking and listening skills. Following this up with question-posing is
    both motivating and liberating for the children – so much of school life is
    dominated by teacher questioning. Without questions there can be no
    history. Question-posing introduces children to the methods of historians,
    whose questions drive their investigations. The children invariably ask
    focused, relevant and excellent historical questions.
    Sometimes we omit the statements and simply ask the children to pose
    questions (see, for example, Key Stage 1 children’s questions about the
    Great Fire of London).

    Year group/class
    Year 5/6, mixed ability, age and gender. Thirty-one in the class.

    Teaching time
    The first twenty minutes of a whole afternoon session.

    © IN THIS FORMAT NUFFIELD PRIMARY HISTORY 2005 • VIKINGS


    VIKINGS: WHO WERE THEY? • TN PAGE 2

    Learning objectives
    • To connect to the children’s prior knowledge
    • To form a springboard for teaching the unit by sharing and discussing
    this knowledge
    • To enable children to pose their own historical questions, and to have
    their questions valued and pursued.

    Key questions
    What do you know about the Vikings?
    What do you want to find out about them?

    The teaching
    Episode 1
    Focus: Statements of prior knowledge and pooling of ideas
    Several of the children had done the Vikings in Year 3. Others had seen
    programmes about them on television. Quite a few had visited the Jorvik
    Viking Centre in York, so most knew something about the Vikings.
    So, to discover the nature of this prior knowledge, I asked the children to
    write down three things they knew about the Vikings. Working in pairs,
    they decided together which three things to record. We only allowed five
    minutes for this exercise.
    Then I asked each pair, in turn, to choose one statement to pool. These we
    recorded on the board.
    The statements revealed a good level of knowledge, both general and
    specific, with one notable exception. These are the statements we recorded.
    They sailed in longboats.
    Had many gods.
    They wore helmets with horns.
    They came from Denmark and Scandinavia.
    They didn’t have horns on their helmets.
    They had carvings on the front of their longships.
    They hung their shields along the sides of their ships.
    They went to the toilet in a hole in the ground.
    When people died they went to a place called Valhalla.
    They were farmers.
    They were fierce fighters.
    Much discussion arose around the contradictory statements about horned
    helmets. We found that the class had three ageing books of Viking myths, all
    of which had pictures of Viking warriors with horned helmets on their covers!
    Hagar the Horrible and stagings of Wagner have much to answer for. I told
    the children that no Viking helmet with horn sockets has ever been found.

    © in this format Nuffield Primary History 2005 • VIKINGS


    VIKINGS: WHO WERE THEY? • TN PAGE 3

    Episode 2
    Focus: Raising questions about the Vikings.
    Right, we know lots about the Vikings already. I asked: What else would
    you like to know about them? With the children again working in their
    pairs, we set them the task of formulating three questions they would like
    answered about the Vikings. For five minutes they discussed and wrote
    busily. Then each pair chose their best question to read out. These we
    again pooled, this time on a flipchart, so that the questions could be
    displayed during the teaching of the unit and reviewed at the end.
    The pairs’ questions:
    How many men sailed in their ships?
    Were their gods related to the giants?
    How did they live?
    Did they live in caves?
    What food did they eat?
    Which countries did they attack?
    Which countries did they take over?
    How did they speak – what language?
    When were they around?
    What sports did they play?
    What other weapons did they use apart from spears?
    What were their longboats like inside?
    Were they as vicious as people make out?
    These were good questions and Leila’s, the last on the list, was a gem – a
    genuine historical question. It addressed directly what we were aiming to
    examine throughout the unit. The children were able to answer most of
    their questions during the second lesson, when they conducted group
    investigations into a range of aspects of Viking life.
    However, for today we focused on how we find evidence to help answer
    such historical questions. We asked: How can we find out the answers to
    our questions? We can’t get into a Tardis and go back in time. The
    children came up with: dig up things that have been left in the ground;
    read books; read diaries; go to museums.
    Excellent: the first answer led us beautifully to archaeology as a key
    source of evidence about the Vikings. We proceeded to simulate the
    excavation of a Viking burial mound for the rest of the afternoon.

    Nuffield Primary History project


    General editor: Jacqui Dean
    Author of this unit: Jacqui Dean

    © in this format Nuffield Primary History 2005

    downloaded from www.primaryhistory.org

    © in this format Nuffield Primary History 2005 • VIKINGS

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