Pirate Unit

I was really pleased with how my desert preschool unit turned out, but it was a lot of work to put together. So I decided that I'd do a unit from homeschoolcreations.com (since she had such cute ones and they're all put together already) in between the weeks I do the units I put together. That way, the week we do her lap books, I'll can spend my spare time putting together stuff for our up-coming unit. It's been great so far.

For the last two weeks we've been doing a pirate unit, #1 because my boys are obsessed, and #2 because I got a hold of the pirate story kit from Springville Library. (For those who don't know, a story kit is a large duffel bag with a theme, such as pirates, and it has 10 kids books inside on that theme, and a folder full of different activities, art projects, snacks, etc. that revolve around that theme. And depending on the kit, it might also have puppets, or cookie cutters, or a computer game, or some other extra. You can check them out from the library just like a book. They are REALLY cool. I wish every library did them.) I meant to only take one week on this unit, but we had so much fun with it, we ended up stretching it out over two.

My kids' favorite activity by far was making their own spy-glasses. They fold up and everything, just like a real one. Pretty cool. I'll post the instructions below, but I speak from experience when I say, use hot glue instead of tape to hold the string in place, especially if you're kids are as rough as mine. It'll hold better, and everyone (especially you) will be happier.

In the preschool pack, there is a sheet of capital and lower case letter cards. Once our spy glasses were finished, I cut out the capital letters and hid them all over the living room. Then the kids used their spy glasses to hunt for the letters. They gathered them all up and stuck them on the wall next to our preschool table. The next thing to do was put them in order from A-Z. I love this video of Linc talking himself through it.

Once he had the capital letters in order, then I gave him the lower case ones to match with the corresponding capital letter. He did really well; p,d, and b, give him a little trouble, but at 3 1/2 I think we've got some time to work on it. :)

There are about a million pirate books out there to read, but my favorites for this unit are: On a Pirate Ship by Sarah Courtauld, How I Became a Pirate by Melinda Long and David Shannon, and Shiver Me Letters! A Pirate's ABCs by June Sobel.  On one of the (few) sunny days we had last week, we took Shiver Me Letters outside and read it while sitting on the driveway. Every time the pirates in the book found a letter, Lincoln wrote it on the sidewalk to "keep track" of the ones we'd found already. :) I love sidewalk chalk, it makes practicing writing so much more fun than a pencil and paper. Linc did the entire alphabet, without help, and although not every letter was perfect, you could tell what each one was. I was so proud of him. The rain washed away his alphabet before I could get a picture of it though.

Another fun activity in the lapbook was the pirate pictures. We cut them out and taped them to straws, and while I was reading the pirate stories, if I said any of the pictures, Lincoln would hold them up. When we weren't reading stories, he still used them to act out his own stories. Linc also had fun organizing the pirate ships according to size. He insisted that the big one was Daddy's ship, the next one was mine, then his, then Ivan's, and the baby one was for Adelia. How convenient that there were five ships and five members of our family. :)

For an art project we made a parrot p out of foam and craft feathers. Lincoln and Ivan both did one, and they turned out really cute. The one pictured is Ivan's, since a couple days later Lincoln wrote his name with marker on the front of his. We got the idea for that here. She had a letter craft to go with every letter of the alphabet, upper and lower case.  Super cute! We'll be going back here often.

We did a fun moving activity called Shoot the Cannons. I taped an empty paper towel roll to the banister on the stair case. Then I had the kids put bouncy balls and ping pong balls (cannon balls) through the tube(cannon). They were running up and down the stairs and laughing. Linc even counted down before he shot his off, which I think is a remnant of our unit on astronauts.

 The preschool pack had a board game on the back that Lincoln just loved. He and I played any time he could talk me into it, and when he couldn't he just played two pieces by himself. I think I'll be trying to put more games like this into our units. They are so fun, and they reinforce counting really well.

Another fun game we played was a bigger/smaller game. I gave Lincoln a "parrot" feather and the first round he had to find five things that were bigger than his feather. He rounded up a picnic blanket, a belt from my jacket, one of Adi's dolls, a baby spoon, and two link-a-doos. For the second round, he had to find things smaller than the feather. He brought me, one Trio block, a Nerf dart, a tennis ball (it was shorter, so I let that count), a magnet off the fridge, and a Trio rod.

Here's a collage of the lapbook. On the front is Lincoln's book review, his name, and some pirate decorations. In the middle is the parrot p, the pirate vocab words, the pirate alphabet, and animal cards of some of the animals in the books we read. On the back is the board game, which can be folded up when not in use. When we put the folder away, we tuck the five pirate ships, and the straw picture puppets inside.

As a grand finale to our pirate unit, Lincoln got invited to a pirate themed birthday party! I'm sure the mom didn't plan around our pirate unit on purpose, but her timing couldn't have been better. Lincoln had to dress up for the party. Here he is on his way over there. He said he was doing a pirate smile.