“Everyone get in the boat. Row, Norsemen, row!”
With teacher Terri Carlin standing at the helm of a life-sized viking ship, Iola Elementary School third-graders grabbed their oars to guide the ship through choppy seas toward Iceland on Wednesday morning.
A video played on screen at the front of the room, showing the harsh conditions they faced. They could see the front of a ship bobbing through icy, rolling waves.
“Who’s protecting us?” Carlin asked.
“Ref Re Re!”
The students shouted in unison, repeating the phrase again and again so their rhythm matched each stroke of their oars. (Ref Re Re — pronounced ref ray ray — is the name of the dragon “carved” into the front of the viking ship.)
They continued the chant until land appeared on screen.
“We see land ahead so let’s just float right in,” Carlin instructed the students.
She climbed down from the chair she’d been standing on. 
“That’s how we start every day,” Carlin explained. “We have to get to the next place.”
This week, Carlin’s class is learning about the Norse Vikings. They read stories, followed by imaginative activities.
It’s part of a pilot program for a new language arts curriculum that includes literature, history, geography and science concepts in creative ways to reinforce skills in reading, writing, listening, and speaking. The school board voted in March to purchase the curriculum for all elementary classes next year. 
THIS week, Carlin’s class has traveled to Scandinavian countries such as Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Iceland.
And, yes, they are traveling in a viking ship.
It’s a life-sized structure built out of wood, cardboard and construction paper. It’s large enough for all the students to sit inside, a row on each side. Each student gets a cardboard oar to row to the next destination.
Terri Carlin’s husband, Roger, had the idea to build the ship. She came home from work one day and he surprised her with plans he’d carefully drawn on graph paper. He built the ship and installed it in her classroom over the weekend so that when students arrived Monday morning, it was waiting for them.
“It just kind of sailed into our room,” Jase Emmerson, one of the students, explained.
“We didn’t know it was going to be there so we were really excited.”
