Sweet E and I had such a fun "P is for Pirate" week! All learning aside, we did a ton of playing, and she has a brand new love of pirates. Click on the links below to revisit similar themes from the past, or keep scrolling to see what we did this week!
Pirate Theme + Quiet Bins - 2015
P is for Pancakes - 2015
Peter Pan Party - 2014
The Letter P - 2014
Pirates - 2012
Books
Port Side Pirates is from our own collection, and is one of our very favorite books! It comes with a CD so you can sing along, and all of my kids loved it at this age! Our favorite library pick this week was Shiver Me Letters: A Pirate ABC.
Dress Up + Pretend Play
We pulled out some pirate garb that has accumulated over the years, from big brother and sister. And we pretended to be pirates, using all the pirate phrases we could think of. She loved this, and we played often throughout the week.
Introducing the Letter P
I made our usual worksheet to introduce the letter P. She did tracing and stamping...
painting with a q-tip...
giant pushpin poking...
and building with playdoh!
Treasure Map - Follow the Shapes
I got this idea from a website called Homemade Preschool, but decided to make my own map! I drew it onto brown craft paper, then asked Sweet E to crumple it up for me, to make it look weathered.
Then I set up some shape cutouts across the house, and we were ready to hunt for treasure!
She started at the circle cutout, then identified what shape we needed to find next. Once we reached the X, we found the treasure!
I used a Melissa and Doug pool toy that we happened to have, but it's easy to make a treasure chest of out any box or wipes container, like we've done in the past!
The gold doubloons and gems were a new toy I bought from Amazon for just a few dollars. The kids were all so excited to discover it inside our treasure chest!
This activity was so much fun, we did it twice in a row that day, and then again on other days of our week! Here she is on a rainy afternoon checking out her map!
And following it from shape to shape across the house!
Ah hah! It must be burried under that X!
Number Identification
I found a wonderful free set of printables from Gift of Curiosity, and our next three activities come from there. First up, counting jolly rogers, and clipping the clothespin to the correct number!
First she counted them by pointing to each one, one at a time!
Then she found the right number out of three choices along the bottom, and put the clothespin on it.
She did this until all of them had been completed, from 1 to 10!
I left them out on her activity table, and found her doing them again later in the week with Minnie and Mickey!
Nice job!
Follow the Path
This printable also came from the free pack. Sweet E needed to lead the pirate to his parrot, by dotting all the P's!
She did terrific!
Scissor Skills
This third activity from the free pack was just simple cutting practice. I had seen a neat trick online, to tape the strips of paper to the table, to make it easier for her. And it worked great!
This way she could focus more on the cutting, and less on holding the paper straight!
Buried Treasure - ABC Sorting
I put circle stickers from A to P on her gold doubloons, and hid them in kinetic sand along with some gems.
Sweet E had to find them and identify the letters...
then match them up on a paper I placed beside her sand tray.
She had no trouble!
Then she hid the doubloons back in the sand, and did it all again!
Buried Treasure + Sorting Colors
We flipped over our paper and did the same thing with gems, sorting by color!
What a great week!
