Friday 11th October

On Thursday we concentrated on why the Vikings became explorers instead of just staying in Scandinavia where they were from. We focused on one of the reasons which is that the Vikings were big on trading precious items and, in order to do this, they had to travel all over Europe in order to find people to trade with. The grid below shows some of the items they used to trade.

silver	silk	spices
wine	jewellery	glass
pottery	honey	tin
wheat	wool	wood
iron	fur	leather
fish	walrus ivory	slaves

To help us experience what it was like to be a Viking trader, we pretended to be Vikings and played a trading game. Each Viking (one of us) had a sheet with the precious items above on it. Each Viking picked out 18 items from the bag. They ticked off the items they had managed to pick out and looked to see what they needed and what they could afford to trade. They travelled around the room looking for other Vikings who would trade with them what they needed. The first Viking to collect one of every item called out ‘bingo!’ and was the winner.