Norse Mythology

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

“Create Your Own Norse God Trading Cards”

In this activity, students will demonstrate their understanding of characterization in Norse Mythology by creating a set of trading cards based on the characters.

Each of the main figures in Norse mythology has their strengths and weaknesses and their own individual quirks. In this project, you can demonstrate what you’ve learned about the various kinds of Norse deities, their enemies, and the significant creatures populating their world. You will choose eight figures to portray and make a trading card for each.

1. Choose a total of eight characters. Your characters should include the following:

• At least four of the gods/goddesses
• At least one giant
• At least one mythical creature.

2. Use Norse Mythology to research your chosen characters. What are the most important characteristics to communicate? Which details will help your audience distinguish among the characters and understand their actions?

3. Create or choose a picture to include on the trading card. Be sure to respect any physical description offered in Gaiman’s text.

4. Create the cards.

• Your cards may be in a true “trading” card format or in a format that mimics the collectible cards in games like Magic, Pokémon, etc.
• You can draw these by hand or use a template such as those found at this site or this site.

Teaching Suggestion: By design, this project requires students to prioritize which characters are important enough to include and what details about these characters are most revealing. It may be helpful to guide students through the second step of this project by modeling how you would choose the most significant details for a particular character.

You can shorten the time required for the project by allowing students to work in small groups. Or, if time permits and you want to challenge students further, you might ask them to also create a visual family tree for their characters by drawing Yggdrasil and the nine worlds, labeling significant locations such as Niflheim, Bifrost, Asgard, Midgard, Jotunheim, and so on. Then, they can place their trading cards into the correct positions, drawing labeled lines between characters to indicate any known family relationships. Even if you decide against asking students to create such a display, you might want to include time for them to share their work with others so that they can compare their choices and reflect on their relative success.

Differentiation Suggestion: English language learners, as well as students with dyslexia and those with attentional or executive function issues, may struggle to sort through enough text to gather relevant details for eight different characters. Even if the rest of the class works individually, you might allow these students to work with a partner or small group or consider reducing the number of cards they are responsible for creating.