Pirate Unit Study and Activities

 

I'm not sure what possessed me to do a Pirate Unit Study. I think I was just thinking about how much Ziggy would like it. But we all ended up liking it so much! I learned a lot of things I didn't know, and tied in to many eras of history I hadn't really studied before. It was such a fun unit. It ended up being a pretty long one too!

One fun activity was making our own "Jolly Roger"-style pirate flags. We looked at pictures of other pirate flags for inspiration. The children's flags turned out quite scary! Goldie's flag (above) was particularly devious. It looked like a regular country's flag at first, and then could be flipped around to show that the ship was actually owned by the fearsome M.E.N.! Look at that terrifying pirate marigold emblazoned upon the flag.

Some links for fun things we did:

Video about the Barbary Pirates

Parts of a ship and lots of other interesting pirate links

Even more parts of a ship

Types of pirate ships—if you've ever wondered, as we have, what words like "schooner" and "sloop" and "frigate" mean.

I thought "ship worms" were super interesting to learn about (they are really a type of burrowing clam!)

This video teaching how to tie different knots was really cool. The kids learned to do several of the simpler ones! The explanations and terminology are fascinating too.

Pieces of eight really were coins cut into pieces!

Pirate weapons

We learned about scurvy

We learned how to play Liar's Dice and it's so fun! Very simple, too. Once we got it down we played it a lot, and even the big boys liked to join in. Basically all you need are cups and a bunch of dice.

Have you read about the discovery of the "Queen Anne's Revenge," Blackbeard's real ship? I hadn't. It is a fascinating story. They're still preserving and cataloguing artifacts from it. You can look at some of them at that link.

One of my favorite things to learn about was the basics of sailing and navigation. It was interesting to hear how smart they actually were about it even back in the 1500's and 1600's.

I didn't know the Gulf Stream was so important for sailors. This video talks about the Jet Stream, which the children got interested in after learning about the Gulf Stream.

Information about sailing a big ship like the Queen Anne's Revenge

We watched "Pirates of Penzance" during this unit, of course, and also "Blackbeard's Ghost." Oh, and "Swiss Family Robinson" and "Muppet Treasure Island." Some good ones.

Teddy worked really hard on his red skeleton flag—it was especially hard to cut it out around all those little corners—and it turned out great!

Clementine stole Ziggy's flag, which seems right somehow

Ziggy's skull and crossbones was so good! He did all the drawing and cutting himself!

Junie's had some meaningful symbols on it. Who would dare attack a flag that showed the hourglass sands of life expiring, alongside that bloody sword?

Daisy made up a whole story about her flag, how it was owned by a pirate princess who wasn't actually mean, but wanted to appear so. Her skull is a cupcake and her crossbones are cleaning supplies! That is actually quite appropriate for dear Daisy, who wouldn't hurt a fly.

Oh goodness. Gus's Caw Pirate flag is the cutest. I had forgotten how cute it was. How did he draw such a cute Caw?

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Another day, we made pirate puppets out of paper bags and felt. I cut up an old bandana to use too. (Inspiration from here.)

I liked the variety of pirates the children made. The Pirate Caw is cute, and I love the lady pirate too. (We actually spent a day learning about parrots and macaws as part of this unit because…why not? They sort of go with pirates! Close enough! It was worth it to read all the parrot and macaw books to Gussie!) We even made little paper macaws, just for fun.

I love this guy's mustache and eyepatch!

This ponytail is so good.

Junie's Captain Blackbeard. I like his earring!

Ziggy's scary pirate crew!

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One of Ziggy's pirate drawings…as you see, this pirate is soon going to get a stern talking-to from the Navy Police! Zig was ambivalent about pirates, really. He wanted to like them, and did like them…but also was horrified at their law-breaking ways! As a frequent policeman himself, he didn't feel he could condone such behavior. I felt much the same myself! We talked a lot about why some men would have chosen piracy, and what their other options might have been.

We watched "Captain Phillips" (it's a good movie with Tom Hanks, about modern day pirates…quite intense) with the older girls during this unit, and that sparked some interesting discussions too.

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We learned about map-drawing and I had the children draw a map of a specific place, either in the house or the neighborhood—somewhere we could recognize. Then we tried to guess what each other's maps depicted. (Here are some images of pirate maps we looked at!)

I think the one above is Marigold's map of the storage room. It shows the big paint buckets, the furnace, Christmas decorations, even the grinning pumpkin bucket on a shelf in the corner!

This is Daisy's detailed map of the main floor of the house, even showing furniture, and stepping stones and swings in the backyard!

Ziggy's maps were both so great! He really has an eye for them. This is the house…you can see stairs going up from the van in the garage…then stairs going down in the front of the house and Seb's car parked out front. Then the stairs going upstairs, and Ziggy upstairs in the loft wearing his police outfit! So great!

And this is his map of the hill and the park in front of it, plus a tiny Ziggy riding his bike around it—which about sums up what you would have seen if you visited our house during this time period!

Radar Mapping on Venus activity

This is an activity I'm still rather proud of because I thought of it myself. :) You can see it in its previous iteration here. The idea is to learn about how radar can help astronomers map the terrain of a planet like Venus, where they can't actually see and photograph the surface.

The activity proceeds as follows: First you get a box of some kind and fill it with things to represent mountains, valleys, plains, holes, etc. You want a variety of heights to mimic a varied terrain. Then cover the box with paper so no one can see what's inside. This is like the cloud cover on Venus

Next, take a long wooden skewer and color the bottom end of it a different color every centimeter or so. (I believe last time we used actual cm measurements, but this was a little tricky to figure out—the colors worked better for younger children.) This skewer is like your "radar" which bounces off of objects beneath the "clouds."

Have the children take turns poking the skewer into the paper. For each poke, note the color the skewer goes down to. Whichever children aren't poking can make a map of these colors. If the skewer can only poke down to red, make a red dot in that spot. If it pokes all the way down to blue, make a blue dot. And so on.

The more pokes you make (or the more radar measurements you record), the more accurate the picture of your terrain will be!

Once you've made measurement dots over the majority of your paper, you can translate that into pictoral data and get a topographical picture of your surface. You can see how we did this: on the paper above, we have a big area of turquoise dots in the left corner, a long area of pink dots along the right side, and so forth. Once those areas were filled in with color, the result was the paper below. You can read this map by remembering that the colors move from warm (high) to cool (low)—dark blue is a low valley; light pink is a high mountain.

We tore off the paper over the box to see how accurate our map was compared to the actual terrain. Pretty good! We accurately mapped the valley on the left side, the long parallel mountain ranges, the deep sinkhole, and even the long sloping hill (the slide).

The children had so much fun doing this that they wanted to keep doing it on their own. They loved hiding objects under the paper and then poking through to see what they could discern about them!

When we talked about Venus, we also discussed how clouds form, and how air pressure relates to cloud formation. 

We followed the instructions for this "cloud in a jar" activity here. This little demonstration shows how as you push down on the balloon (increasing the air pressure in the jar) and then release that pressure, a "cloud" instantly forms in the jar.

Civil War map and timeline

Here's what our bulletin board held during the Civil War Unit. I highly recommend this map---we referred to it, put pins in it, looked up casualties on it, and lots of other things. It was a great visual reference. The sheer number of battles in the Civil War is just amazing; you learn about the big ones and you know that isn't all of them, but I don't think I ever realized just how many there were. We also had a timeline which we added to during the unit. It was really simple: just dates of things we thought were important, along with pictures to help us remember which battle was which.

Battle Re-enactment

I thought this was a great idea, from the book The Civil War for Kids. We drew out a large map of important landmarks near a battle (we did the Battle of Chancellorsville) and then the children moved our toy soldiers around to the relevant locations, as I read to them the events of the battle. We did this on the day we talked about the biographies of Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, George Meade, and others. It seemed like a good way to realize how many decisions the General was responsible for, and how complicatedthose decisions might be (taking into account limited troops, blocked-off supply routes, river crossings, etc.).

Radar Mapping (Venus)

When we were studying Venus we learned about how some space probes used Radar Mapping to determine topography on Venus (since they couldn't see through the thick clouds). This seemed like kind of an abstract concept, so we talked about topographical maps and then I had the boys try some "Radar Mapping" of their own.

I just put some bowls into a shoebox and covered the box with paper so they couldn't see inside. Then we took a long skewer and marked centimeter markings on the side. The boys poked the skewer through the paper, observed how far it went in, and recorded their measurements on top of the paper. You have to remember to write down the number corresponding to the height of the object beneath, NOT how far the skewer goes in. In other words, I gave them a maximum height from ground to "cloud" (I think it was 11 cm), and then if the skewer went in 4 cm, we wrote down "7 cm" (11 minus 4) as the height of our mystery object. They caught on to that pretty quickly.

They had to make lots of measurements to make sure they were getting a good picture of what was underneath!

Once we had the paper full of measurements, I had them color it in with markers, using warm colors for the highest points and cools for the lowest points. Then I asked them to describe what they thought was beneath before we looked inside. They said "two mountains---one taller than the other."

Which was exactly right!

This was fun. They wanted to do it again, so they did it themselves for awhile during free time later that day.