The Vikings & Scandinavia
This year for history I’m curating our own mini unit studies centered on the Middle Ages. You can read more about it over on my 2023-2024 Curriculum Picks: Family Style History + Geography post. We started with a study of the Vikings and while we were at it we also explored the Scandinavia countries and more specifically Sweden. Two years ago I introduced my older girls (now 10) to the Vikings and I thought I might be a little bored studying them again, but we took a totally different angle this time and all loved it! Here is what we used:
Art Makes Me Smart: Around the World Scandinavian Guide. Hands down, this is the best resource we used. The Around the World guide has 11 countries of study. In each study there are art tutorials, book lists, recipes, and tons of pre-screened educational YouTube content. We spent lots of time exploring the video content and absolutely loved everything we came across. There were Viking videos in here too. We also did both of the art projects: the Viking longship and the folk art animals. The tutorials were perfect for my kids ages 6-10 and even my 4 year old joined in on some.
Also, a little tip, one of the things I’ve found very helpful with the Art Makes Me Smart tutorials is to have a good light board for my kids to trace the templates that are provided. Also you may notice we try to keep all their art projects in their history notebooks (see more on those below.)
Books: I had a good collection of books to pull from for this unit and I’d recommend all of them.
The Medieval World: We’re using this as our spine as we study the Middle Ages so we’ll be pulling from this all year. In this book we learned about Viking homes, more on the longships, how they bury their dead, the routes they explored and where they settled.
Into the Unknown and Explorers: Both of these books are about explorers of the world and have sections on the Vikings. Into the Unknown is a really neat book because the pages fold out which my kids love and things like that always catch their attention. Into the Unknown features a foldout Viking ship that we used to learn more about their longships and we also read all about Vineland. Explorers taught us more about Leif Erikson.
Leif the Lucky: This is another great book on the story of Leif’s life.
Raiders from the Sea: I have heard fantastic things about this chapter book! I just barely started it with my older girls so I can’t give our full review of it yet, but we have high hopes.
Nordic Tales and Norse Myths: Okay, we haven’t found any stories from the Nordic Tales book that we love YET, but I’m keeping it in our current book stack a little longer - hoping we come across some stories we like, ha! I was totally drawn to the beautiful cover and artwork of the book. In contrast we weren’t really drawn to the illustrations in this Norse Mythology book, but it’s been way easier for the kids (and myself to understand). It introduces the Norse gods and the kids have actually really enjoyed the stories - especially my 6 year old. We’ve met Thor and Loki and the kids instantly picked up on the “frost giants” and “stone giants” as characters in Frozen.
Book of Nations: This is a beautiful book featuring all the countries in the world so we used this as we learned about Sweden.
If you need, I have a collective list of all the Medieval books we’ll be pulling from this year linked in my storefront.
Viking Map: We used this along side The Medieval World while we we learning more about the viking routes. This is nice because it’s available as a free printable.
How To Train Your Dragon: I am throwing a plug in for this movie even though it isn’t very educational, ha! We just happened to watch it during our unit and realized there were Vikings in it. My favorite part was how the kids pointed out that their Viking hats were historically inaccurate - which is something they’d learned from one of the videos we watched. But, they loved these movies and have watched them multiple times over the last few weeks. I think sometimes fun extensions like this really bring the other learning to life and help spark more interest for when we’re in the books or watching more formal lessons and that’s exactly what this movie did for them.
Timeline Book: We already had the Vikings in our timeline book from last time, but if you haven’t started a timeline of history yet - we sure love ours!
Notebooking: For this unit we have our longships, folk art animals, viking maps, and the kids wrote their name with a pretend ruin alphabet chart in their history notebooks. We used a guide I just found on google that had 26 letters, but we learned that the original ruin alphabet only had 16 symbols. We also glued in a typed up summary of what the kids learned over this unit. These are the notebooks we use and the 7x10 are a perfect size!
That’s it! Over the next few weeks we will be moving onto kings, knights, and castles which I think is going to be SO fun! We’re about a week away from Halloween and, it’s funny, because my older girls chose to be dragons for Halloween - like over a month ago. I didn’t plan for it to all fall into place, but I think it’s pretty timely.