Pirate Celebration

Our Pirate Celebration was one of our best of the year. Something about Pirates just lends itself well to a good party! The best part was that I split the children up into teams and had them plan and execute everything. Goldie and Teddy did decorations and invitations, Daisy and Teddy planned and led a treasure hunt activity, and Junie was in charge of a Pirate craft activity. I took charge of food.

Daisy found the idea for this amazing treasure chest online. It was made from papier-mâché in the original, but she and Teddy just made theirs out of cardboard. They spent multiple days painting it, "aging" it, and adding all the textural details. It turned out so well!

Junie planned out a design for a Pirate Ship and then made the base form for it. During the party, everyone helped add the railings, mast, and flag to decorate the ship.

So much fun! Gus and Clem took a ride in the vessel when it was finished.

We were all happy because Malachi thought he was going to have to work, but then got to come home early and join our celebration. (He doesn't LOOK particularly happy in this picture, but I'm sure he is!)

Goldie's table decorations were wonderful. She made palm trees and little island, set out candles and skull candlablras, strewed out a few bottles with messages inside them, and filled chests with gold and jewels. Oh, and she used our model ship too.

She also found a bunch of old plastic bottles we'd used for a sand bottle craft at our family reunion a few years ago, and decided they would make good rum bottles. We made homemade root beer, and she labeled it with her own labels she designed on the computer. They were so cute! "Caution: extremely fizzy. Caution: dark color." There was a "contains no alcohol" on there too, just to make sure. :)

Teddy and Goldie have their serious pirate faces on.

Ooh, I think that's a countdown-to-Abe-coming-home chain up on the window.

For dinner, I made salmagundi, which is basically just a big composed salad platter of things pirates might only get on special occasions. I read that "the name is supposed to come from the French salemine (meaning highly seasoned), but it’s believed the word salmagonde was coined by the French writer Rabelais in the 16th century from 'salmagondis', which means a mix of widely disparate things. These two definitions sum up the pirate dish." I just kind of threw together things that seemed like they'd taste good and everyone would like, but I drew inspiration from pictures and recipes here and here. The dressing in that second link was really good. I made our salmagundi with cucumbers, lettuce, tomatoes, salami, shrimp, salmon, and hard-boiled eggs. The dressing (sort of a hollandaise sauce) was good on all of it!

Junie also made the little jello "jewels", and Daisy helped with the orange wedge "pirate ships." Everyone helped decorate a cookie pizza as a "treasure map."

We loved the treasure hunt Daisy and Teddy planned. They'd made the clues on carefully singed scraps of paper and we had to piece them together to form a map once we'd found all the clues.

 The treasure at the end was, naturally, their wonderful treasure box, filled with a mixture of chocolate coins and pretend gold coins. Spilling out of the chest bountifully, of course!

I love 

We watched "The Pirates of Penzance" to end the night. We love that movie so much. And I love my little band of pirates!

Pirate Costumes

We were in the thick of our Pirate Unit for Halloween (we'd just finished learning about bats and making our bats, which was Halloweeny too, and all without any intention on my part!) and Marigold made the best Halloween costume with things we had around the house! I loved it! She used the red coat from when Sebby was a British soldier years ago, and she was a bold and fearsome Pirate Queen! (With a little squishy parrot on her shoulders!)

When Ziggy saw Goldie's costume, he was inspired to make one of his own. He always has loved to come up with costumes! (And here is a different parrot entirely.)

Clem-parrot

Another iteration of Zig's costume

Good little pirates!

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!