How did the Vikings help create England? (AQA History GCSE)

This lesson is part of the AQA History GCSE ‘Migration, Empires and the People’ module, specifically section 1: Conquered and Conquerors.

It uses the blue Hodder migration textbook, but if you’re using the collective textbook with all the options in you’ll just need to find the correct pages and adjust accordingly on the PPT.

This is the first lesson of the course, and so gives an overview of the different topics and themes studied. It’s a good idea to stick in a copy of these themes, the lessons are colour coded to match (same thing can be added to any of your own lessons, feel free to change the colours).

When I’ve taught this, it’s been in a school where we had studied the AS and Vikings in Y7. If this is not the case, change the started task to anything they might know about the period. Lesson gives a good brief overview of what happened between the Romans leaving, into the Viking invasion. There is then a task to help them familiarise themselves with the Viking invasion, Great Heathen Army etc.

Second task asks them to make a comparrison between Alfred the Great and Aethelred the Unready.

From experience, these lessons from the earliest period of study are the ones they find the hardest from the whole course, so go slow and make regular revisits to the content.