Archive for February 22nd, 2010

pirates ahoy!

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

One of our boys bounced into kinder and told everyone that he was going on a holiday to “Pirate Bay”, which got the whole group talking about pirates and what they do.

pirate hat activity

The children decided they wanted to make pirate hats. Fortunately we have plenty of newspaper available, so we set up a table.

pirate hats 2

We showed the children how to fold an old favourite, simple style, triangular pirate hat …

pirate hat 3

and off they went.

pirate hat folding

They managed extremely well to follow the instructions and we were very impressed!

pirate hat 4

They folded, stuck and decorated their hats.

fantastic pirate hats

They did a wonderful job and they looked fantastic!

map drawing

Pirates of course hunt for treasure, so many of the children went off and made their own maps.

map drawing 2

This was very exciting!

X marks the spot

One child even made the “X to mark the spot”!

treasure hunting we will go

Then they headed outside armed with their maps.

hiding treasure

They hid treasure!

hunting for treasure

They searched for treasure  …

digging for treasure

and they dug for treasure!

still digging

Large groups of children spent the whole morning in the sandpit digging up a large assortment of treasures.

spades, stone & dinosaur bones!

Uncovering all sorts of things from cars, boats and spades to old shells and stones. Some children even uncovered what must have been … dinosaur bones!

more treasure

While others preferred to collected ‘clean treasure’ from around the kinder.

drawing our group map

We finished off the day with the whole group creating a map of our playground …

treasure map

… all drawn by the children!

group treasure hunt

Then we went en masse, following the instructions on the map, through the playground until …

our 'pirate' ship

we found the treasure hidden in the ‘pirate boat’!

pirate treasure

Naturally all the children were very excited to be able to take a piece of the precious treasure home!

Considering the early stage of the year, the children were amazingly cooperative and worked extremely well together as a group.

By the way, we changed a well known song, “A sailor went to sea, sea, sea” to “A pirate went to sea, sea, sea”! The children loved it!