Teaching Primary History: Anglo-Saxons & Vikings for Key Stage 2

The following Key Stage 2 history lessons have all been judged to be outstanding according to OFSTED criteria. There is a wide variety of teaching and learning activities as well as a rich array of teaching resources including PowerPoint® presentations. New lessons will be regularly added to meet the demands of the changing primary curriculum.

>>ADDED MAY 2012 NEW SMART TASK:  What were the real reasons why the Saxons invaded? see below

>>PLEASE NOTE Although the current government has abandoned the planned changes of the Rose Review and is probably going to back a narrower content-led curriculum favoured by Gove, the advice you will find here still holds good.  The Anglo-Saxons are one of the few groups of people from the past who featured, by name in the proposed new Orders. For teaching suggestions of how to use the outstanding lessons, written with the precise requirements for the 2011 curriculum in mind, click here.

Outstanding KS2 Lessons

• The mystery of the empty Saxon grave. Pupils are put in the role of detectives to investigate the Sutton Hoo bodiless ship burial.  Having looked at the clues they then use their deductive power to work out which of 4 suspects is most likely to have been the owner.

• How do we know where the Saxons settled? Literally bells and whistles: testing a simple hypothesis about where the early Anglo-Saxons lived and how we know.

• Vikings: What were they like? Starting with a fun reconstruction relay about Viking ships.

Smart Tasks

• Push or Pull?  What were the real reasons why the Saxons invaded? A fun thinking skills activity in which pupils infer from visual clues before moving on to analyse a range of influence cards and evaluate a video before coming up with their own explanation.

• Are we fair to the Vikings?  A question of interpretation
   

Teaching the  Anglo-Saxons & Vikings to Key Stage 2

The focus should be on the nature of the settlement in Britain and the evidence that remains. However, because the Vikings is such as dramatic topic, it is developed beyond the nature of settlement.  It is important to help children to appreciate how careful we must be when labelling groups of people, whether it is today (asylum seekers, Polish builders!) or in the past.

The lesson on the Vikings: What were they like?  when the children act as Saxon spies and find out about their legendary ships, is a good way into the Viking topic which has at its heart the question: Raiders or Traders?

Pupils are asked to counter the relatively stereotypical view that often surrounds the Vikings in the media. By asking children to rehabilitate their reputation this lesson makes a major contribution to pupils' awareness of diversity and the need to respect both other societies and the nature of evidence itself. They test the evidence and realise the importance of being sure that your judgement is based on sound evidence. In this way pupils learn to evaluate what is being said. Perhaps the Vikings had such a bad press only because most of the written evidence came from  monks who suffered most at the hands of the Vikings.

The lessons on the Saxons focus on the nature of their settlement and encourage pupils to use a problem-solving approach to map  evidence. The links with geography are very strong here as is use of ICT.

Resourcing your Anglo-Saxon and Viking topics

A great place to start looking for material ion the Anglo-Saxons is the 24 hour museum site for children called showme. You will be helped to explore an Anglo-Saxon village and 3D artefacts as well as seeing video clips of a recent archaeological dig.

The same site can also be a a great starting point for checking out which museums offer pupils the opportunity to get involved in some problem-solving activities using Viking finds.

In the News October 2011: Vikings, raiders or traders? The latest evidence

The discovery of the first fully intact Viking burial site in the UK (October 20th 2011) - on the Ardnamurchan peninsula in Scotland provides a great opportunity for de-bunking some well known Viking myths. The 16ft-long grave containing the remains of a “high-status Viking” who was buried with an axe, a sword and a spear might suggest the typical Viking warrior image. About 200 rivets - the remains of the boat he was laid in - were also found.  Previously, boat burials in such a condition have been excavated at sites on Orkney.  Until now mainland excavations were only partially successful and had been carried out before more careful and accurate methods were introduced.

Other finds in the 5m-long (16ft) grave in Ardnamurchan included a knife, what could be the tip of a bronze drinking horn, a whetstone from Norway, a ring pin from Ireland and Viking pottery. These finds question the stereotypical image about the Viking helmeted warriors pillaging the land at will.

5 good reasons for thinking the Vikings were more traders than raiders.

• Viking warriors were homemakers who couldn’t wait to ship their wives over to settle the lands they had conquered.
• More than a thousand years after the first Viking longships landed on British shores, a study has shown the blood of the Norse warriors still flows through the veins of swathes of the population.
• The Viking genetic marker - M17 - is also present in the Western Isles in large numbers. Clan names are a visible relic; MacIvors were originally the sons of Ivar, MacSween, the sons of Swein.
• The Viking world stretched from Newfoundland to the Middle East and beyond. Objects moved over thousands of miles across a great network. Not all of the objects survive (silk, spices, etc) but others tell of great adventures. There have even been finds of coins and jewellery from as far away as Baghdad, Samarkand and Tashkent - many in areas now argued to be rural and far from modern trade routes.
• While they undoubtedly struck fear into the natives on their arrival, the Vikings settled in Scotland for around 300 years. They were farmers who kept a variety of animals, including sheep, cattle, and pigs, and grew crops such as barley and oats. They also collected plants for medicinal purposes.

Teaching the Anglo-Saxons in the proposed new primary curriculum from 2011

This introduction has been written with the new 2011 curriculum in mind but remember that the bill to implement this was rejected by the House of Commons in April 2010.

If you look at M12 (Years 3 and 4 to you and me), you will see the reference there to pupils knowing about: “The movement and settlement of people in different periods of British history, and the impact these have had”.  The footnote then gives an example i.e. “the impact and settlement of the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans”.

You could also look at the Saxons as a separate society later in Year 5 and 6.  In my experience most schools will look to teach this topic about Year 4. That is what I will take as the target audience. So if we have a context that is approved by the National Curriculum, what about the skills that this unit can develop. This is where I am creating very specific lessons to match the skills outlined below.

Skill a:  Pupils undertake investigations and enquiries, using various methods and sources (including maps, film, and artefacts). The best example here is to look at where the Saxons first settled.  Pupils can use maps of Europe to show where they came from.  This then leads to a discussion about motivation.  Why did they come here?  Pupils are introduced to simple push and pull factors which they have fun reconstructing in the classroom using props to symbolise, and make real the various factors.  They can then take a look at detailed maps of East Anglia to test certain hypotheses.  Maps show where the early cemeteries were. Pupils can carry out an investigation, initially using true/ false statements to test a hypothesis then finish by coming up with their own hypothesis showing that they have developed the thinking skills of detecting patterns. See the outstanding lesson How do we know where the Saxons settled?

Skill b: Pupils compare, interpret and analyse different types of evidence from a range of sources. These skills can be  developed in the context of the mystery of a bodiless grave. The focus is on using evidence from the Sutton Hoo Ship Burial to work out what we can about the possible ‘owner’ of the grave goods.  Pupils make use of the outstanding online collection of artefacts from the British Museum as well as perhaps simulating their own dig unearthing objects (or more likely postcards of the objects) in a sand tray .  This gives them the feel for archaeology and the nature of layers of evidence.  See the outstanding lesson The mystery of the empty Saxon grave.

Skill c:  Pupils are expected to communicate their findings in a range of ways and develop arguments and explanations using specialist vocabulary and techniques. This is a creative variant or follow on from the lesson above. Pupils have to prepare a 45 second, to-camera presentation as if at the site of the Ship burial. They have to talk with excitement as if they have just discovered the identity for sure. This is a valid activity as we cannot be absolutely sure. Pupils use clues which they can ‘show the camera’.

Skill d: Pupils should be helped to consider and debate alternative viewpoints in order to take informed and responsible action. In other lessons pupils might also be asked should they excavate Sutton Hoo once more just to be sure. They would have to consider the cost of such a venture.  Would the money be better spent?  If money was to be used where should it come from? Taxes?  What if we neglect all historic monuments?  If archaeologists hadn’t excavated in 1939 perhaps we would never have known about Sutton Hoo, one of the great wonders of the world. The helmet was chosen as one of the 1,000 top objects in world history.

If you would like to see any examples of draft activities for the above lessons then please email us and we can send  you a few samples.

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