Weekly Theme: Pirates

September 19 is Talk Like a Pirate Day and we are totally stoked! We are going all out this year. We'll be doing some really fun experiments making and floating our own boats to learn about the properties of water. We'll make our own pirate hat and eye patch (of course). You for sure won't want to miss math day this week when we get a special treat to keep the scurvy at bay. Arrrrr!! Stay tuned :)

Books we are using this week:

Pirates is a great nonfiction book all about, well, pirates. It is in the Beginners Series, which means the text is really simple and the information is pretty broad. Just perfect for the kiddos. We'll be covering our history and geography section of this unit using this book.

My son LOVES this book! Often when the baby goes down for a nap Tommy and I snuggle under a blanket, share a bowl of chocolate chips, and search for Pirate Things. It's great for counting practice and number recognition, but it also teaches an important pre-reading skill. Apparently it's really great for kids to be able to pick out small items in a busy picture. It will help later on when they read big paragraphs and have to sift out the important information from the background noise. Who knew that doing something so fun could be so educational?

Tommy carries Illustrated Stories for Boys around in his backpack everywhere he goes. I don't know why, except that he really likes this book. Maybe he's afraid of being bored somewhere? Or needing a weapon to throw at a bad guy? I'm not sure. At any rate, this beautiful book contains a couple of pirate stories that we will be reading this week: Treasure Island, the classic by Robert Louis Stevenson; and The Masked Pirate, a fun fictional story about - you guessed it - a masked pirate.




Update: Here are the links to all of the activities we did this week!
Pirate Science
Pirate Math
Pirate Arts and Crafts

What are some fun pirate activities you are doing this week?