Pirates: Pk-4/Summer

​When your headed to the ocean for a week but don’t want to stop school you got to find away to make it fun! Since we’ve already done ocean week time and time again I decided to base our school week in Ocean City, MD around pirates. In addition to some time playing “on the high seas” they’ve got great kid friendly restaurants including one (Fish Tales) with pirate ship playground. The nearby Jolly Roger Amusement Park puts on a weekly theater show centered around some naughty treasure stealing pirates and if you travel home through the DC area like we did there are several riverboat tour companies that offer a family pirate cruise around the city.
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While the vacation stuff was a blast we started our unit a few days before leaving home (to ramp up excitement) and took a few hotel room breaks due to passing storms to complete the bulk of our “schoolwork” ….though it seldom feels like work for us 😉. I purchased a cardboard create your own lifesize ship from Michael’s on clearance for $12 back around Christmas (highly recommend shopping ahead to take advantage of the deals)….and found it surprisingly easy to assemble. Hooray!! Our other hit purchase this week was a board game from Gotrovo called Treasure Hunt. You lay a trail of simple picture, word, or riddle cards matching objects for kids to follow. There’s a real treasure map, gold coins, and a box for a hidden ending surprise. We’ve done treasure hunts many times before but I appreciated not having to come up with our own clues and all the pirate themed contents made it extra fun!
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Who doesn’t enjoy counting their gold after a good treasure hunt? We got some unusual excitement over counting this week by reusing our game coins. A pirate has to tell her story so I printed a good sight word story with picture helpers from Homeschool Creations. We did a few other printables and made a paper pirate hat. I’m sure I could have found more to go with this theme but since I don’t really care if T learns the history of pirates lol I kept it to an easy mini-lesson for summer and enjoyed the extra play time in the sand!