The Vikings are coming!: Using Julia Jarman's The Time-Travelling Cat and the Viking Terror to explore the past imaginatively

Helen Day
Saturday, February 1, 2020

Julia Jarman’s Time-Travelling Cat books offer a unique way for young people to access history, as they follow heroes Topher and Ka both in modern times and as they travel to other eras. The Time-Travelling Cat and the Viking Terror is a thrilling story which combines real and imagined events, allowing readers to experience a Viking invasion of England through the eyes of an adventurous Anglo-Saxon boy. This scheme of work uses events and episodes in the book as the foundation for further exploratory exercises. It broadly covers the drama objectives set out in the KS2 National Curriculum, and may be used to enhance the teaching of KS2 history subject ‘The Viking and Anglo-Saxon struggle for the Kingdom of England to the time of Edward the Confessor’. Students are encouraged to explore how imagination can aid our understanding of historical events, and use a range of drama games and exercises in order to explore this period of the past.