Hello, and welcome back to another blog post! In our latest project, we looked at the journeys of some early explorers, and wrote a story based on their expeditions. I picked Jacques Cartier, a French explorer who was trying to find a new route to Asia due to an order by his king. I really enjoyed this project because I got to be creative with the writing aspect of it. We also got to create images to integrate into our story, and create a book using the app Book Creator.
The first keystone was different from the second and third, however, in which we created a Viking character card that showed an accurate description of a Viking and showed the differences between the way that the Vikings are portrayed through the media and the way that they actually lived. This project was probably my favourite of the three, as I got to design the Viking and give him a personality. I think that I did a fairly good job of portraying the way that Vikings really lived, as apposed to the myths that have become norms for our modern day society.
Reflecting on the project, I probably could’ve added more detail to my images and worked harder on my graphic design, but in the end I think that it turned out all right.
Here is my book!
Despite all of the stereotypes that we see about Vikings in the modern era, the Vikings lived very differently from the way that they are shown in the media. One example (and the most obvious one) is the idea that Vikings wore helmets with horns. Although the Vikings did wear helmets, horns were impractical, and pointless.
They may have been powerful warriors who would often burn villages and take slaves, but they weren’t evil. The majority of Vikings were really farmers, who needed money to support their families. They built ships to invade the rest of Europe so that they could claim wealth for their own, not just to kill people and burn their homes.
Most of what we know about the Vikings comes from what was written by the people who were being invaded by the Vikings, and so they are portrayed as savage brutes with axes and shields who would burn towns to the ground and kill everybody! They might as well have been monsters in the eyes of the rest of Europe, who were terrified of being invaded by them. We may not know exactly what the Vikings were like, but we do know that they were still human beings, even if they were skilled warriors who liked to pillage and raid for their own gain.