Viking Day part 1

The day began with the wow factor when the class walked into the year 6 classroom and saw our Viking visitor and all of the things he had brought in. 

The first thing we learnt was that Vikings didn't have horns on their helmets or fur, then the class got dressed up. 

after getting changed the visitor began to tell us what they believed in such as the world being flat and that the sun was the inside of a giants skull.

we learnt that ourselves and the Vikings are the same as we are all humans and that we are all very messy. The Vikings threw lots of things away and the things got buried. Now archaeologists go and pick up the Viking rubbish and these things tell us about things they owned and how they lived. We know so much that they have become famous. Famous for the wrong reasons of beating people up. Today we are going back a thousand year ago to a time when the whole land was covered with woods and forests and small areas which had been cleared for people to live and farm.

The class learnt about how the houses were built including mixing the mud for the walls with horse poo so that it stuck. This is called wattle and daub. 

Inside the houses were dark as the windows were small with no glass , there was no electric lights so the light came from the fire and if you were lucky an oil lamp.

the house is just one room and you share it with the whole family including aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents.

viking children didn't have to go to school ( the class liked this idea) but they worked hard in the fields, looking after animals and collecting fire wood. When it got dark would go back in sit around the fire and learn by listening. The next days work, gossip or old stories. Lots of stories were set in the woods.

To travel they had to go on tracks through the woods on a horse at 30 miles a day could take a whole day to get to the nearest down. There wasn't much travel. The Vikings wanted to be able to cross the sea so they built ships in a different way than ships had been built before. They started with a frame and then overlapped the planks and the way they nailed it together meant the boats were strong enough for rough seas and strong enough to have a mast. With sails they could travel at 30 miles an hour. Nobody had ever travelled that fast before .