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Borough Green Primary School

Learning Together with Kind Hearts and Determined Minds

Learning Together with Kind Hearts and Determined Minds

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Raiders, Traders or Settlers? Week 3 - w/c 22 June 2020

History

How have recent excavations changed our view of the Vikings?

We are beginning to appreciate that Vikings were not simply and only vicious warriors - they were farmers, skilled at crafts and incredible ship designers too.  This week we will learn more about these other sides to the Vikings.  At school we were fascinated to learn about Experimental Archaeologists - historians who dig up the past and then re-build ships and buildings so they can experience the life of a Viking.  Archaeology is so important for refining our views of the past and new discoveries are being found all the time - some very recently.  If you love history, you could consider becoming an experimental archaeologist in the future.

The Birka Woman - copy and paste the two website links below into your search bar and read these fascinating articles about archaeological finds.  If you can't use the internet, read the article from the Sun Newspaper 21st November 2019 in the attachments below.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6727171/The-grave-FEMALE-Viking-10th-century-skeleton-buried-Sweden-high-status-warrior-woman.html

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/researchers-reaffirm-famed-ancient-viking-warrior-was-biologically-female-180971541/

Think about the following questions:

What is strange about the evidence found in this burial site?

Why is the cross-shaped brooch important?

How do the historians know that some of the weapons in the boat are unlikely to have belonged to the woman?

What new information do we now have about the Vikings?

Also visit the Jorvik website  https://www.jorvikvikingcentre.co.uk/  to discover more about the everyday lives of Vikings in Britain.  Go to the Education section of the site: there are videos to watch and activities to do.  Below is a picture of a comb for you to decorate and colour.

Watch this video  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1P4Y016qOw in which Neil Oliver visits a reconstruction of a Viking house and finds out what it's like to sleep in a building like this.

Geography

The Vikings travelled from the countries of modern northern Europe across the seas to the north-west of England, east of Scotland, eastern tip of Wales and areas of western Ireland.  Can you complete the Viking invasion map to show their movement?  Parents - there is a completed map to check your answers against.

Writing

This week we have planned your Super Sentence Stackers lessons for you!  So, no Mrs Considine this week but a very exciting story that links to Vikings perfectly.

Last week we all started writing a story set on Lindisfarne.  You imagined being an Anglo Saxon child who was given the responsibility of watching the seas for signs of invaders.  At school we only wrote the first paragraph (Plot Point 1) and we have attached some photographs of our bubbles' fantastic work to inspire you;  you will find them in a document called Lindisfarne Story Examples.  Please ignore our spelling mistakes - last week we focused on crafting excellent sentences which used rich ideas and ambitious vocabulary.  We are really pleased with our detail such as descriptions of birdsong and the sea; if your writing wasn't so successful last week, you could borrow some of our ideas and have another go before starting on Plot Point 2.

 You may have written further paragraphs but we'd like you to take it slowly this week and complete Plot Points 2, 3 and 4 using our lesson plans (see attachments below) and extremely detailed instructions.  Read the lesson plans carefully - there's so much support in them to help you write a very tense and atmospheric story.  Please send us your completed stories.

We have also given you two photographs from Bubble 5 - their drawings in the style of Cressida Cowell and brilliant sentences from their stories.  the document is called Bubble 5 Brilliance!

How To train Your Dragon

In this week's chapter of How To Train Your Dragon (see below - HTTYD Ch 7), Toothless finally wakes up and Hiccup gets to meet his dragon properly for the first time.  We begin to see a little of Toothless's personality and can start to predict how easy he might be to train (or not!)  We also hear Hiccup speaking Dragonese and there is even a short lesson on how to speak Dragonese that you can practise at home.  If you enjoy this, you might like to watch Cressida Cowell teaching you some more phrases in this video lesson:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u96Kc_R8iKA

If you want to find out everything that happened in chapters 4 to 6, you can order a copy of the book online or download an e-reader version

https://www.sevenoaksbookshop.co.uk/shop/how-to-train-your-dragon-1-by-cressida-cowell/

https://www.ebooks.com/en-uk/book/95795460/how-to-train-your-dragon/cowell-cressida/?src=feed&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIpJLAsfCN6gIVxLHtCh2ANgvkEAkYASABEgIK0PD_BwE

You could even read along while listening to David Tennant reading the book to you

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wAeB09o0BI