Pirate Book, Arghhh!

I try to pick weekly themes for our preschool lessons that I know my little ones are going to love.  We've done monkeys, farm animals, insects, cars, and more.  We also recently did a very active Olympic theme week which was a huge hit.  At age 4 and 2, pirates also fall into this category, so it was high time I got around to a pirate theme week!

We spent the week doing all sorts of pirate themed activities, most of which centered around creating a pirate book.  I found the idea for a Pirate Lapbook on Homeschool Creations.  I thought it was so cute.  They used a file folder to make their book, but I wanted to add a few more pages to ours so we made it out of several pages of heavy construction paper.

I combined pages I found from the Homeschool Creations lapbook and from the Pirate Pre-K pack at Over the Big Moon.  This page from the pre-k pack made the perfect cover for our pirate book.  It's also a great way to introduce the letter P, if you want to focus on a letter for the week as well!

We glued the printouts onto thick brown construction paper.  Then we three-hole punched the side and tied on brown twine to make our book.  I tied it a little loose so that the pages can be turned easily and opened fully which makes the game board in the back very easy to lay flat to play!

This is the first page of the book.  It is from the cover of the Pirate Lapbook at Homeschool Creations.  We didn't have any pirate books on hand, but there's no shortage of good pirate stories online!  I found an online children's book callled "The Brave Pirate Monkey".  I read the story aloud, and my son was able to click to move to the next page.  Afterwards we talked about the story, and I wrote his answers down to the questions.

This Color the Pirate Ship! page is from the Pirate Pre-K pack.  I printed it in black and white instead of color so that it would be more difficult to determine the color word.  The Crayola Classic Colors 10 piece marker pack was perfect for this. 

I also included our French color flashcards during this lesson.  As we went over the color words we talked about the French and English name for the colors.  He also wanted to write the color words, but changed his mind after one color!

These little pirate images are so cute!  Actually the entire Pirate Pre-K pack is really cute, but we really had fun with this page.  My son cut out the images and glued them down in the right spot to match the patterns.  We talked about how to continue the pattern on further.  He's really good at stuff like this.  We also had a lot of laughs repeating the third line.  For some reason, it's just really fun to say "parrot pirate parrot pirate parrot" over and over again.

Getting back to the Pirate Lapbook printables from Homeschool Creations, the next page has envelopes to hold the flash cards and a cute little number book.  Along with the flash cards is this cute little one page book from Kidzone, Itsy Bitsy Pirate Book.

I precut the pages of the "How Many Bags of Gold" book, but I mixed up the order and had my son put them in the correct order from 1 through 10 so we could create the book.

To finish off our pirate book we include the game board from the Pirate Lapbook.  This was a huge hit!  We played several times during the week.  My son is too young to read the details on the board, so we went over them each time before we started playing.  He remembered easily, and loved playing this game.  Our two year old joined in for this one.  She could roll and pass the die, but big brother helped her move the piece to the right spot.

His dice skills are definitely improving.  He's able to recognize the number most of the time instead of having to count the dots.  We used these cute little money bag game pieces that were leftover from an old board game.  They went along perfectly with the pirate theme, but any kind of place marker would do.

Stay tuned for more on our pirate theme activities!