It’s time to learn about Vikings in our homeschool! I’m so pumped because I don’t know much about them (HA!) That doesn’t scare me! It makes it all the more exciting doing it with the kids. We will be learning so much together, and I’m thrilled! So, as we go through our unit, I’ll be writing this blog post. I hope to share the books we are reading for our unit study as well as the different activities we do.
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Library Haul
My first step in any unit study is to collect books from the library. I’ve shared this before, but my main strategy is to just head to the non-fiction section and start putting books in my bag.
This time around I did have a few books I put on hold just in case. So, I grabbed those first and the rest were a surprise.
I’m so excited! For this unit I had some time to make a YouTube video sharing all the books we used. Check that video out here.
Below are just a few of the books that we got and loved for our unit. The first three were great to read front to back as a fun read aloud. The rest are good reference books that we used to research other topics, like geography, art, clothing, and more.
- “Great Warriors: Vikings” by Valerie Bodden
- “Viking Longships”
- National Geographic Readers: Vikings
- National Geographic Kids: Everything Vikings
- DK find out!: Vikings
Planning
Next, it’s my turn to do the studying. I like to just flip through the library books and skim through the pages. The pictures and text inspire me before I start hunting for different activities on Pinterest. This also helps me know which books will be easy to read to my kids and which ones might just be a good reference book on our shelf.
As I looked through each book, I made a note of some focus topics that the book discussed: ships, food, Viking men and women, recipes, clothing…anything.
Next, I headed to Pinterest and looked for some inspiration of any topics that I knew would interest me or my kids. I’ve saved all of my pins in one board called “Vikings” if you’d like to take a look.
Read Alouds
We always do our read aloud novels before bed time. This has been so great for us. We read so much more, my kids can wind down, and most of the time it’s quieter than our morning time.
For this unit, I’m trying something new and reading TWO books at bedtime. One is nonfiction – “Magic Tree House Fact Tracker: Vikings”. The other is a fictional novel – “Imagination Station: Voyage with the Vikings”
In addition to that, each of my bigger kids (8 yrs and 6 yrs) listened to an audio book separately during their quiet time. Through our library app (Libby) we checked out “Magic Treehouse: Viking Ships at Sunrise” The book is only about 40 minutes long so they were each able to listen to it in one day and had a chance to exchange what their favorite part was.
These three books alone will teach my kids and I so much. Having this as the backbone to our unit will help us learn all sorts of information, but it also gives me confidence that I don’t need a ton of extras. We will be soaking in facts and fun through books!
Extra Activities
Now is the part where I get to share the fun, “extra” things we did for our unit. I personally think reading together is great and the following things aren’t necessary to learn. However, it brings me joy planning them and my children LOVE them. So, we continue to add a few fun things here and there in our units. I hope sharing them with you may inspire your family, as well!
Geography
The Vikings lived mostly in Scandinavia, but they sailed to many different countries. I felt like this was a great opportunity to talk about our seven continents.
First, I found a free printable online that was blank, black and white, and would allow us to label the continents. Once we did that we colored each continent a different color.
I also shared a couple of videos online that talked about the different continents and what you may find there. One is shorter, animated, and silly. The other is a little longer, has real pictures, and LOTS of facts. Both were great to watch!
- The Seven Continents Song (2:22)
- 7 Continents of the World (9:29)
We were also able to use a few of our library books. Almost every book has some sort of map in them, but a few had maps that showed different routes the Vikings traveled.
During our second week of study, I printed out a Viking Map that I found online for free. We were able to mark where the Vikings lived, where they raided, and where they settled. It was super simple and easy to do together. The website where I found this gave an example of the finished product so there was no guessing or researching for me.
Baking Bread
I planned to make a bread recipe that we found in one of our books from the library, “Viking Longships”. The recipe was for something called Birka bread. I’m not sure what happened, but it smelled bad, and it looked like slop. It did not have a dough consistency, so I was unsure how it would turn out.
I quickly found another recipe I saved on Pinterest and threw it together so that we could try both breads. It was really easy, and I happened to have all of the ingredients already in my pantry.
The Birka bread was sort of like a pancake consistency and had a sweet flavor. It definitely tasted better than it smelled. A couple of my kids actually preferred it over the other. The other bread was very dense and pretty dry. It was good with butter and honey.
Either way, it was fun to make and eat what the Vikings may have eaten long ago!
Viking Lunch
This was probably the easiest themed lunch I’ve ever done. I had everything already at home and decided to throw it together last minute. I found the idea from a blog post that suggested to read “Leif the Lucky” along with it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find that one at the library OR a good quality read aloud on Youtube. So, we just ate the lunch!
All it took was a PBJ sandwhich, pretzels, raisins and bananas. My kids were so surprised and thought it was so cute. Now, if you see the picture, the bananas act like horns on the helmet. However, from what we’ve been reading, that’s actually a false representation of a Viking helmet. Real viking helmets did NOT have horns. Fun fact of the day!
Art/ Runes
The Vikings art was really in their craftsmanship. The carvings, and weapons, and jewelry were all really neat to see in our library books. We were also able to see runes, which are kind of like a Viking alphabet. We used one of our books that had a chart of all the runes to do a simple and fun activity.
Using a toothpick, we carved words into Play Doh to make it look like runes on stone. It was neat to see our names written that way.
My oldest and I enjoyed cracking the code a little bit. Her and I would come up with a 3-4 letter word and use the chart to try and decode the message. This can get tricky because some symbols represent multiple letters.
Snack – Drinking Horns
When I saw that the Vikings used drinking horns, I was certain there was a craft for that, but didn’t find anything! So, I came up with my own simple little snack to pretend we were Vikings.
You’ll need the triangular shaped waffle cones to be your horn. We filled ours with yogurt and granola to make a simple parfait, but you could definitely fill it with ice cream or something else.
That’s it! It was so silly and fun, and the kids loved saying “Cheers” before eating it.
Music
The DK find out! series had a page on the music that might have been played during Viking times. Over lunch one day I read through this page as we observed the different types of instruments and read about how they were used.
I found this GREAT selection of videos from YouTube that shared more about the same instruments and the guy hosting the video even played them. It was really neat, and it brought the instruments to life for us. The videos are short and sweet and made the instruments very memorable!
Language Arts
During this unit, I was re-evaluating our language arts program and trying some new things for my oldest daughter. While doing that, we were able to use the history books we read for a few language arts lessons, which was really a lot of fun.
I would read a story about the Vikings from the library. Then, my daughter would write 2-3 sentences about what we read. I’d sit down with her and help her edit her sentences or add to them if we needed to.
As a treat, I’d let her add a picture from an online drawing video. I’ll link the two videos we used below:
This was really a great way for us to incorporate our studies into language arts and it really inspired me to do it more.
Notebook/Portfolio
At the end of each unit we do, I like to have the kids draw a little keepsake for our study. It’s very simple. I have them tell me about something they learned and write it down on the paper (Sometimes my oldest will write it on her own) Next, they draw a picture.
While we did this, we listened to an audio book about vikings, “How to be a Viking” by Cressida Cowell. This book was written by the author of the “How to Train Your Dragon” series. We learned that this picture book was the one that started it all!
We keep all of these drawings in a binder, and it’s so neat to go back and look at all of the things we’ve learned together over the year. This is my first year doing a portfolio like this, and I will definitely continue!
We loved studying the Vikings!
This was such a fun study for us. A couple random things to add in…We did watch How to Train Your Dragon 2 during our study because it’s technically about Vikings. I was actually kind of disappointed with it. The movie itself was fine, but the Vikings didn’t look like what we studied and they didn’t even ride in longships! So, that ended up being kind of a bummer for me. Maybe the first one is better about that? I haven’t seen it in a while.
This next thing is not really kid-friendly…but I’ll share anyway. During our unit study, my husband and I started watching the series called “Vikings”. It was originally produced by the History Channel but eventually it moved to the Prime app. We started it about a week before our unit kicked off, and it got me really pumped up to begin our study. JUST A HEADS UP – this show is very gory, creepy/disturbing at times (I’m talkin’ human sacrifices and such…yikes!), and there are some love scenes as well. Like I said, NOT child friendly at all. However, it was very fun to connect with my husband in a way that related to our homeschool studies! So, watch at your own risk…everyone has their preferences.
Well, that about does it for our history unit! I always hated history as a child, but I am loving it as I study with my children. I feel so blessed to have these days with them. Have you studied the Vikings yet? I’d love to know if you do any of these activities! Comment below or tag me on Instagram @simply.learning.together. I love hearing from you guys!
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5 Responses
So delighted I stumbled on your blog. Some great ideas and really great resources that will help us on our Vikings unit! Thanks for sharing!
I’m so happy to hear this! Thank you so much! Glad you’re here!