Viking Review, Assessment, and Feast!

Today in class we placed the review pages for our Vikings unit into our History notebooks. We went over each page and highlighted the parts that would be most useful to review/study. Students were to begin bringing their notebooks home tonight to go through the information, practice the map skills (also available on our game Viking Exploration), and review the vocabulary words from the unit. The assessment on Monday should be pretty straightforward, and all of the information needed is in the History notebook. If your student was absent and has missing pages for any reason, please remind them that they need to be sure to use either my notebook or one of a responsible group-mate to catch up when they return. 

Now, for the FUN part- details about our upcoming Viking Feast!

When:        
Tuesday, November 24th from 2:00-3:30 
Where:       
in the CHPCS lunchroom
Why:          
to celebrate learning and enjoy a meal together as a community
Who:          
3rd grade students and their families. Parents, siblings, grandparents are welcome!
What to expect:   
We will be performing 3 short plays, followed by a feast fit for a Viking!
What to bring:     
Each student is asked to bring a dish to share. Dishes may be dropped off in the Zip room Tuesday morning or brought by an adult to the feast at 2:00. 

From BBC.co.uk: "With no fridges or freezers our Viking family has to take special measures to stop their food going bad. Meat and fish can be smoked or rubbed with salt. Fruit can be dried; grains are made into bread or ale. Dairy produce such as milk is made into cheese. Cooking the meat will make it last a little longer, making sausages will make it last longer still.

At sunset the family gather together in the long house. The usual evening meal will be enlarged tonight because it is one of the three Viking feast nights. In their homelands a horse would have been sacrificed to the old gods. Horsemeat was spitted and roasted rather like a kebab. There will also be salted fish and pork, goat and plenty of fresh bread. For dessert the Vikings will eat fresh fruit and a little honey on buttered bread. Ale will be drunk as well as mead, a beverage made from honey.

Horsemeat was spitted and roasted rather like a kebab.

The Vikings had bowls and plates very similar to our own, but made more often from wood rather than pottery. They ate with a sharp pointed knife, which served as both a knife and a fork (the latter would not be invented for another century). Spoons were made from wood, horn or animal bone. They were often carved with delicate patterns of interlaced knotwork and the heads of fabulous beasts. Drink was taken in horns, similarly decorated and sometimes with metal tips and rims."

From History.com: "While we might tend to think of Vikings standing over huge roasting pits with joints of mutton dripping onto hot coals, evidence suggests roasting and frying weren’t the favored cooking methods of the time. In fact, Vikings most often boiled their meats. Indeed, the centerpiece of the day’s meals was a boiled meat stew, called skause. As meats and vegetables were taken out of the pot, new ones were added, and the broth became concentrated over days of cooking.  Skause was eaten with bread baked with all sorts of grains, beans and even tree bark–birch bark can be dried and ground and is actually very nutritious. Vikings used old bread dough to make sourdough loaves, and would also use soured milk and buttermilk to enrich their breads.

Vegetables and fruits were much more wild than any of our modern varieties. Carrots would have been added to the daily skause, but they weren’t orange; white carrots were the only ones available. Viking farmers cultivated cabbages, beans, peas and endive, and wild apples and berries were also available to Middle Age diners. A wide range of herbs and seasonings helped flavor Viking food, with spices like coriander, cumin, mustard and wild horseradish making an appearance at the table."

And, this page from Viking Answer Lady has a Longship load of information about food, including several recipes found at the bottom of the page. 

I hope you found this information helpful. Please let me know if you have any questions! Also, please write "Thor" in your child's planner for a Home-school connection Dojo point! (or send me a dojo message).