A Pirate's Life For Me!!

In my limited experience so far with casual / substitute teaching, it is not usual practice for class teachers to leave their day's planning for subs to follow.  So I love to put day-long plans together and I love to use a theme.

Yesterday I had such a fun day with a Kindergarten class that I have taught a few times now.  An added bonus is that the school is the one that our middle daughter attends, and it is only a 1 minute walk from our home!

Our theme yesterday was PIRATES!  I love pirates and I have yet to meet any little person that doesn't like them too!!

We started the day with Pirate name tags.  I just used Avery labels and my favourite clip art from Thistle Girl Designs to create the labels and then I wrote each child's name with black pen as I marked the class roll.  They loved them, only a few fiddled with them and I only had to replace a few at home time, so they could show their parents!!

We started the day by watching and singing along with the fun 'Portside Pirates' book by Oscar Seaworthy and Debbie Harter from Barefoot Books, on YouTube!  It is so catchy, I am still singing it ;)

Then we watched and listened to the picture book 'How I Became A Pirate' by Melinda Long and David Shannon which I found via  HERE ...don't you just love Tumblebooks??

Both books were great for getting the children to think of lots of fabulous pirate-related words to use in their independent writing tasks.

We then used the 'If I were a Pirate' story map and writing sheet, both from the amazing Deanna Jump's Pirate Literacy and Numeracy Fun Unit which I purchased from Deanna's TPT store.  Did I say that I LOVE this unit?!!

For Numeracy we played the 'Build a Pirate Ship' game from Deanna's Jump's Pirate Literacy and Numeracy Fun Unit.  I had made up 6 sets and laminated all the pieces and the game boards....this way I can keep them and use them over and over ;)  We played this in teams of four and it was so popular we ended up playing it 4 times over!

We also played the 'Roll A Sight Word' colouring game from Deanna Jump's Pirate Literacy and Numeracy Fun unit.  This was a fabulous activity and we completed a tally chart and then converted this into a bar graph, with the children having wonderful fun taking turns writing the tally strokes on the board and then colouring in the squares on our bar graph.  Their discussion of the graph afterwards just blew me away....I love how Kindergarteners think!!  I unfortunately didn't get a picture of their worksheets as I bound them into a book (cover is the pic above)  for them to keep in their class library...I try to do this every now and then as the children seem to love it and they love being able to give their class book to their class teacher:)

For science we focused on floating and sinking and after a fabulous discussion on the best way to sink a pirate ship, we used unifix maths blocks to sink our Pirate ship model.  I had all the children make a guess as to how many blocks would be needed to sink our ship.  We wrote all of their guesses on the board.  Once we actually conducted our experiment, we checked to see who had been closest with their guess...they love it!  Then we guessed how many staplers it would take to sink our pirate ship, and why... who knew it would only take one stapler to sink it ;)  Most of the children wanted to use cannonballs, but we couldn't find any marbles or ball bearings to use...*note to self:  buy some for the next time I teach this lesson!!*.

Throughout the day I had given each table group merit points for settling quickly, working quietly and being kind friends to each other.  The table with the most points were spared from 'walking the plank' ;)  However, given the choice they all chose to walk the imaginary plank, just before the home time bell....too much FUN!!

I can't wait to have some more pirate fun again sometime soon!  There are so many fabulous pirate themed resources out there!  If any of my readers have some that they have made, please let me know...I would love to use them and give them a shout out here on my blog:)

Ahoy Me Hearties!!

Pirate Tina :)