Argh, Matey!

We had the BEST last 4 days of school this week.  The kids had SO much fun!  They were all very well behaved (can you believe it!) and were engaged in learning (yes, learning!) the whole week.  I am SO proud of them.  I think it helped that our beach centers were TONS of fun!

A wonderful friend of mine shared with me that she had decided to do a pirate theme to end the year.  That got my brain spinning! I ended up staying late on Sunday night to prep some fun pirate stuff – I am SO glad I did!

Here are some pics of what we did over the last 4 days:

We read LOTS of pirate books!  The Pirate Pete books were definitely a favorite! It was REALLY funny when he was searching for the “booty.” Oh man.

If your school has access to Tumble books, both How I Became a Pirate and Pirates Don’t Change Diapers by Melinda Long are on there.  The kids love “watching” books on Tumble books!

We also have fun subtracting with pirates!

 

We made these ADORABLE pirates that were inspired by {this} as seen via Pinterest.

We used Crayola’s skin color paints (on a paper plate).  For the hat, I just traced the plate and a piece out of the middle so the hat was about 4” high.  (Make sense? I got 2 hats out of one circle).  The “ties” are just 1” x about 6” maybe and the kids just cut those in half.  I used my handy dandy circle punches for the dots on the hat and the eyes.  I used a larger circle punch for the eye punch and just trimmed the top part off.  It was a SUPER simple project.  I just all of the circles when they were working – just walked around and punched circles for each table!  Don’t you just love the pipe cleaner earring too?!  We hung them from the ceiling for a couple of days and they were SUPER cute!

My kids can NEVER get enough of these games!  The first one is a sight word game in which I hide the treasure chest behind one of the cards, and they have to read the sight word to find it.

This is another fun game in which they sit in a circle and pass the treasure chest around.  They pull out a sight word and if they can read it, they put it in the middle – if they can’t it goes back in the box.  There are other fun “action” cards in the game as well.  These are both in my Swashbuckling Sight Word Games pack.

I found this AMAZING box at Really Good Stuff a couple of weeks ago on CLEARANCE and I knew it would be perfect for this game! I just used a basket before, but this makes it EVEN MORE FUN!  I printed the cards a bit smaller for this game – I just printed 2 pages on 1 and it worked perfectly!

We also played this roll and color sight word game from Deanna Jump’s Pirates Math and Literacy Fun pack.

and we played this game from KinderbyKim (Kim Jordano).  This is in her Pirate Pack.  I modified it slightly and cut out circles and added tally marks for the kids to pull from the treasure chest (ahem, a paper bag) because I was short on time.  But, she does have game cards to play this game included in the pack.

After we read Deanna’s book from her Pirate Pack, we talked about what we would do if we were pirates. 

On our last day, we had SO much fun dressing up as pirates!

We made hats and we all even had eye patches! I wish I could show you how cute their faces were! They were adorable!!

We also played “Parrot, Parrot on my Head!”  So.Stinkin.Fun.  If you haven’t heard of Katie and Company, you need to stop what you’re doing NOW and go over to her website and check out her goodies!

I actually pinned the parrot hat on my shoulder for most of the day, and the kids thought it was hysterical I’m sure Julie will be at I teach K in Vegas, so be sure to save room in your suitcase! Her stuff is A.MAZ.ING! I already see some new things that I don’t have! ahhhhhhh!!!! Intervention, please!

We also went on a treasure hunt. SO. FUN.  How lucky was I that someone was throwing out this treasure box.  My thermal bag from 31 fit perfectly inside of it. I put the scavenger hunt cards all around the school and we came back to popsicles! FUN!

Here’s a little pirate booty for you! If you would like the Scavenger hunt cards – here they are!

To end the day on Thursday, parents were invited in for our portfolio day.  I’ll post more about our portfolio’s on another day.  It was a PERFECT end to the last day of a great year!

I’m certainly going to miss this year’s crew, but I’m excited for more adventures in Kindergarten next year!

PS – I’m thinking that I need to make some Pirate themed math and literacy centers for next year – are you interested??