Pirates lapbook

Our project for September was pirates, as Iona has been very interested in them. I researched them in several library books, as well as checking various lapbooking sites, but mainly this time the ideas were my own.

We read several fiction books on pirates, including "Pirate Patch and the Abominable Pirates" (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pirate-Patch-Abominable-Pirates-Impey/dp/1843629895/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1288980209&sr=1-7) and "Class 3 All at Sea" (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Class-Three-All-at-Sea/dp/0340944668/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1288980415&sr=1-1-fkmr0), as well as a children's fictional version of Captain William Kidd's story.

I particularly enjoyed finding out the history of pirates, using an Usborne book, and the lives of famous pirates. Iona was also quite interested in the different pirates, and we made a concertina book listing some of them:

We watched the Disney "Peter Pan", which Iona really enjoyed, and "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest", which she was less interested in. We made another concertina book of things beginning with the letter P, which Iona is getting quite good at identifying:

We talked about pirate treasure, and counted a pirate chest filled with 8 pieces of 8 (Iona now can count objects with some help).

We identified the colours silver (which she knew) and gold (which she didn't), and I made a pirate treasure map. This fitted in well with activities at our local children's centre, which had a table set up for tea bag painting (even suggesting it could be used to make a pirate treasure map!). I painted a sheet of paper with the tea bag, then drew a detailed plan of our living room. I placed an X over a compartment of her table, then placed 5 copper coins in the real one when she was out of the room. When she came into the room I showed her the map and helped her to use it to find the "treasure". This was a great find for her, as she loves putting coins into her piggy bank, and she talked about finding the "treasure" for several days.

As a way to include some spiritual and religious / teaching, I made a very small book with Iona about "Crime and Punishment". We talked about what it felt like if people took your things, and said that this was called stealing, although I glossed over the exact punishments used for it in the 18th century! Since then, I have periodically reminded her what stealing is.

The pirates theme allowed for quite a few craft activities. Iona now has a bag of Mega Bloks, which we received free from the Made for Mums site (http://www.madeformums.com/) in exchange for writing on their community what we thought of them. We used this to make a pirate ship between us:

I also showed her how to make a pirate sword by cutting out some cardboard and wrapping it in foil. After making 2 of these I showed her how to play sword fighting: