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.

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

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

and off they went.

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

They folded, stuck and decorated their hats.

They did a wonderful job and they looked fantastic!

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

This was very exciting!

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

Then they headed outside armed with their maps.

They hid treasure!

They searched for treasure  …

and they dug for treasure!

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

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!

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

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

… all drawn by the children!

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

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

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!