Primary history : vicious Vikings

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Summary

At Headley Park School, Bristol, teachers use inventive ways to engage children's thinking about the Vikings. In Viking Comic Strip teacher Tim Browse asks children to imagine they are different ch...

At Headley Park School, Bristol, teachers use inventive ways to engage children's thinking about the Vikings. In Viking Comic Strip teacher Tim Browse asks children to imagine they are different characters during a Viking raid. They act out their role (monks, Vikings) using freeze frame images depicting the point in the story. They then create a comic strip from their drama using thought bubbles and photographs. This activity combines an experiential element with speaking, listening and thinking skills.In Archaeological Dig, teacher Alexa Vickery asks the children to dig up Viking objects out of sand, identify and draw them, deciding if the object is really Viking from their learnt knowledge of Viking life. Norse or not Norse is a fun game in which children have to write a true and a false explanation of an object and present it to the class. It asks the children to draw on skills of writing and persuasion, to build convincing argument.

In Artefact Pursuit children play a board game which encourages them to ask searching questions about objects from the past. They must also start to generate their own research questions and get research underway using books and the internet. In Shades of Grey children look at how historical figures shouldn't be seen in terms of good and bad but in terms of the varied contributions they made to society at the time. The object is for children to also understand that perspectives of characters can change with time. In Luckiest Historian, Year 5 children build an understanding of the qualities of primary and secondary sources. The teacher uses cards to represent many kinds of historical sources and asks the children to put them in order of usefulness in terms of their reliability and their richness as a historical source. By ordering the sources they start to think about the value of different sources when doing particular historical research.

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