Preschool Corner ~ Pirate Unit and Pirate Lapbook

Our pirate lapbook ended up being closer to a three week learning time. Kaleb loves pirates.

L.O.V.E.S. them. He has a colonial hat that he loves to wear, a sword constantly stuck in his ‘gunbelt’ and we have read the book On a Pirate Ship more times that I can remember.

With as long as we were doing the unit, you would think that I would have actually managed to get more on my ‘idea list’ covered…but that didn’t happen. :) I’ll share the lapbook here with you all and also all of the ideas that I had ~ and let you know which ones we did manage to get around to! I don’t have as many pictures this go-round…go figure.

The Pirate Unit

I’ll break up the things that we did by topic/subject. We read the book {over and over again} every day and did a few activities from the lapbook each day and also did 3-5 activities from our unit study.

Bible

• Verses: The first one we talked about was ‘You shall not steal.’ {an obvious choice, no?}; our main verse was Matthew 6:21 ~ “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Kaleb isn’t one to ‘perform’ much, so this was a BIG deal getting him to say his verse on camera. :) I know he sounds like he’s muttering, but really he’s ‘singing’ it like on our Seeds of Purpose cd. {lapbook piece}

Language/Spelling

• Vocabulary {words from the book}: enormous, steer, twinkling, clings, glittering, fearless, tricky, adventure
• Pirate words: anchor, jewels, treasure, boat, sails, sailor, parrot, map, canon, doubloons  {lapbook piece} Hint: print off an extra page to use as a matching game!!
• Uppercase/lowercase ABC matching {lapbook piece}
• Tell what happened in the story and favorite part of the story {lapbook piece ~ front of lapbook}

Math

• How many bags of gold? counting up to 10 {lapbook piece}
• Pirate game ~ identifying numbers and moving correct number of spaces {lapbook piece}
• Pattern with ‘jewels’ ~ I had planned to buy some fancy jewels to use for this, but we ended up just patterning 1” circles from paper.
• Size sequencing ~ we sequenced pirate ships from large to small and small to large {lapbook piece}

Science

• Animals ~ We printed off word card pictures of all the animals in the story and put them on a jump ring so we can add more animals from other stories that we read. We also sequenced the animals by the order we saw them in the book.
• Direction ~ We had some fake compasses that we used to talk about North / South/ East / West
• Weather ~ we talked about storms and calm seas, how you could tell a storm was coming in the book, etc..

Crafts

• Make a periscope/telescope. We used toilet paper tubes and paper towel tubes covered with saran wrap on one end and tinfoil all around for ours. HUGE hit.
• P for parrot craft
• V for violin craft {one of the pirates is playing the violin}

Fine & Gross Motor

• Write name ~ actually traced it to put on the front of our lapbook {lapbook piece}
• Walk the plank ~ we did simple balancing outside along the edge of our playground area. You could also tape a line on the floor and walk the line.

Personal Hygiene

• Brushing teeth ~ one look at most pirate’s teeth and you realize the importance of brushing well! :)

Art

• Stripes/dots ~ we looked through our book to find all of the stripes on the pages and then all the dots {there are stripes on almost every page}

Fun Stuff

• Puppets!! We printed out the puppets from our lapbook kit, stuck them on popsicle sticks and had fun playing with them
• Dig for buried treasure!!! A sensory bucket filled with dirt and we had fun digging for gold coins in the dirt.

Other things we wanted to do, but didn’t have time for {based on the book On a Pirate Ship}:

• ABC’s: Put a magnet on the end of a pirate hook and ‘fish’ for letters.
• Language/Spelling: spell the word ‘pirate’ using other letters {build words using the word cards}
• Science: steamy drinks {the pirates are drinking them}, sink the pirate ship {see how many 1” blocks you can put on a foam tray before it sinks}, talk about the the wind {storms at sea, wind blowing curtains on last page}, shadows from how the sun is throughout the book
• Crafts: make an ‘ocean’ water bottle
• Art: shades of blue {similar to all the shades of the ocean ~ dark to light}, draw a pictures like the one on the last page of On a Pirate Ship
• Musical Instruments: the book shows accordians and violins being played

The Pirate Lapbook

The pirate lapbook is a bit of a mix of the unit study and also has standalone pieces. On the front of the lapbook is a tracing/writing activity where Kaleb traced his name {all capital letters}. One of the things that I’ve been focusing on when we read books is having Kaleb tell me what the book was about and what his favorite part. I wrote his ‘summary’ of the book On a Pirate Ship and also his favorite part of the story.

The back cover of the lapbook has a pirate game board taped to it. I laminated each of the pieces and taped them together and to the back of the folder.

Inside the lapbook we glued our mini books {Parrot Colors & Bags of Gold}, added our Bible verse, the pockets for our ABC uppercase/lowercase matching cards and our pirate word cards, and then a big pocket to store our extra stuff {sequencing cards and puppets}. The pocket is just half of a 9×12 envelope.

View all the pieces of the lapbook and download it on the Pirate Lapbook page.

Additional Resources

The verse that was a part of our lapbook was “Where your treasure is there your heart will be also” from Matthew 6:21. It is a part of the Seeds of Purpose cd that we love and listen to often!!

Stories & Books We Used

Tools We Use

I’ve put together a ‘preschool store’ of sorts through Amazon that shows many of the tools and toys we use during our preschool time ~ and some of our favorite things.

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