Concept Week #10: Pirates

Pirates was lots of fun.  My kids are crazy about pirates - actually, show me a kid who isn't.  They love Captain Jack Sparrow, they love the Disney movie "Treasure Planet" (based on the book Treasure Island), they love the Muppet movie "Treasure Island," they love Scooby-Doo episodes that involve pirates (especially the Globetrotters one), they love the Scooby-Doo movie "Pirates Ahoy!"... I'm sure you are getting the picture here.  We even have pirate lego sets.  My kids love pirates, and they love playing pirates.

So doing a unit about pirates was both a piece of cake and a blast.  Now, I went to education.com where I got some pirate dot-to-dots, word searches, math problems, coloring sheets, etc. but they were really rather light on actual schoolwork.  It was all fun stuff, which was a bit disappointing, but not the end of the world.  They did have a pages about famous pirates (real and fictional) including Blackbeard, Captain William Kidd, and Captain Hook.  So we did get to read a bit about them.  They also had an abridged version of Treasure Island up so we printed that and I read it to them.  The unit was very light on worksheets, but truthfully it was a nice break with how hectic our schedule was while the unit was going on.

We had another jigsaw book for our project, this one obviously about pirates.  It was a neat book.  You followed Captain Lotsaloot around as he and his crew pillaged ships on the sea, while reading about real pirates and how they actually lived.  So not only was it full of pirate puzzles (a win as far as my boys were concerned) but it was also full of pirate facts (a win as far as I'm concerned).

For our book we read a Serendipity book called Cap'n Smudge by Stephen Cosgrove.  Now, the book was about a fisherman and not a pirate, but he did have a bird and a wooden leg.  Also, we don't have any kids pirate story books, just books about the way pirates lived and survived.  Since we had already covered that with their pirate jigsaw book I didn't see the need to tackle it again.  So we read a story book about a mean fisherman who ran around polluting the water where everyone fishes because they made fun of him for having a wooden leg.  The story ended with a moral, like all Serendipity books do.