New week who dis?! Whats the opposite of starting with a bang? Slowly crawling to the start line?! We may be starting our week here, but it’s not Monday. It’s Tuesday. So right off the bat this is going to be another week where there are four days of activities instead of 5. I am the Margaret Thatcher of home education, long weekends for all, seems dreamy, but we’d all be better off if we were doing 5. Anyhooooo, enough Iron Lady banter. New week means new theme, and this week is pirates.
I’m going to be completely transparent here. I was putting the boys to bed a few days ago and we were discussing themes we wanted to do for our activities. Each of us took turns making a suggestion. I said pirates, to which William said “pirates are lame.” There was a sort of awkward silence after he said it, it was the rudest thing he’s said in his short little time on the planet, and he obviously shocked himself. I didn’t want to make a huge deal out of it, because especially in front of Teddy I don’t want them to learn bad behavior gets a massive reaction, in case they start to act out for the attention. Instead I just told him that I felt sad that he felt they were lame, that calling anything lame was rude, and that next week we were now definitely doing pirates. So here we are stuck with pirates, because there is no way I’m going back on my word now!
For the craft you will need
- Printer to print the pirate pictures
- paper
- crayons/markers for coloring
90% because I was semi forced into this theme and didn’t have anything properly planned, and 10% because every one loves a coloring opportunity: we started the week in the VERY easiest way with basic coloring sheets. I’ll link a couple below, but there are probably 9,006,243,423 online. Just google “pirate printable coloring free” and you’ll get a zillion.
Arthie decided that there was no way he was going to take his second nap today, so he joined us for coloring. I’m sure I’ve said it before, but wowee this toddler goes mad for coloring. If it were not for the fat that he has zero concept of the edge of a piece of paper, I’d let him color all the time. Over the last month he has turned the kitchen floor, the kitchen table, the playroom wall, and the library floor into works of Art…hur.
Sticking with my theme of “this has to be on a free printable somewhere” for our academic activity I found the most phenomenal pirate themed unit for pre k-k.
Teddy busied himself with some excellent counting and labelling of groups of pirate themed items. His pencil grip is completely wrong, and I’m struggling to get him to adjust it, (all suggestions sent my way please!) but his forming of numbers in particular is coming along really well. It’s going to be so interesting to see how he does at Pre K/reception this fall. From what I can see so far he is by far my most academically able child, however he is definitely my least hard working…. He also did a matching activity and some filling in blanks with the missing sound. He’s definitely much more into the math than the reading at the moment, long may it last. we need one solid mathematician in the group.
William had two different activities. The first came from the packet of pirate activities that I also used for Teddy. I printed him the cut and sort activity because William is really very messy, and completely neglects any sort of non essential fine motor skill. I’m hoping that this summer I can give him tons to do with craft scissors and glue sticks, and he will naturally strengthen in those areas. I know I’m probably never going to take him really “care” about staying in the lines, or the best spots to place glue to use a small amount effectively, but I am hoping I can at least stop him from cutting essential parts of diagrams off because he’s rushing. His second activity was a read works (linked here). It was a fiction piece which I thought would mean he would struggle with the questions, but he did a super job, even if his absolutely rubbish mother forgot to print answer lines again. I’m the worst ever. However, on a positive spin, we completed day one of our new theme, everyone survived, google did us proud, and there was minimal effort or prepping required from me. Onwards to day 2, see you there!
LINKS AND SOURCES TO RESOURCES
Raising Truffles 