Pirate Week

As any stay-at-home mom knows you play a lot of roles. Often, the one I find most difficult is the role I call "cruise director." The children all get up around 6:30. Henry and Bridget do not nap and they go to bed around 7:00 p.m. That is more than 12 hours of entertainment everyday. I try to encourage a LOT of free-play and independence, but many (many many many) hours a day are spent organizing activities.

For me, organization and pre-planning things makes everything easier. I found this website where another Mom had put together a "home school" curriculum with a theme for each week. I LOVED this idea. We do a lot of the same things each week and this allowed me to gear all of these everyday things into a theme. The mom's suggestion was that week 1 should be cows. Ugh. I cannot do a week of cows. So, this week we did Pirates. Arg!

This is our work poster. Pirates were the theme. Buccaneer the vocabulary word. This week was also the letter A, number 1, shape of an X and the color red.

Monday is almost always library day so we got a ton of books about pirates both fiction and non-fiction. From there we learned about how they dress, what they did, what they ate, what their ships looked like....everything!

Henry was WAY into his pirate character. He found a sword, a gun, talked with an accent, made a pirate ship and dubbed Mow the pirate king. He really took to it.

Bridget was pretty good about it, but eventually we used her hat to make her a pirate queen dress and she dubbed herself Pirate Poo-Poo.

ARG!!!

Pirates love to swim but in Cleveland Heights pirates wear swimsuits. We used the baby pool and hose to learn about currents. Shark Emmett supplied a lot of splashing.

Here are my pirates having a break. They are eating hard-tack (biscuits). We also had pasta with seaweed (pesto pasta), seaweed quiche (spinach quiche), fish sticks and lemon fish. Serving Pirate Henry was awesome because he would say things like, "Fish! I love to eat me fish - arg!" Never have the kids eaten so much green food. I nearly died and went straight to heaven when they ALL ate what I served.

Emmett was not so into the pirate theme so he played shark nearly all week. He is wearing a shark shirt here. He really only loved the pirate food and saying, "arg!"

We practiced writing in the sand (dried beans). I have some pictures of the two of them practicing but cannot get them to load.

We also went geocaching. Thankfully, there were two caches within walking distance of home. Here are the children declaring this cache as pirate booty!

One day when we had the car we headed to the nature museum which has a planetarium. We checked out star charts (navigation), shark skeletons and cave markings (for hiding booty). Henry also found a skull that was very pirate-like to him and insisted on a photo.

When I was talking about shapes and showing them the letters A and number 1 I could see Henry thinking very hard. Later, we went downstairs to the chalkboard and he asked me to write his name. He said, "oh, it is just lines and shapes!" and copied it. You could almost hear the click when he understood. I was so proud. The only thing that made me happier was when he showed Ben and told him, "Now I can get my own library card!"

Goodbye Pirate week - Next week.....Broadway!!!