End of the Summ-arrgghh Treasure

End of the Summ-arghhh Treasure Hunt

Summer school came to a close yesterday and we ended with a Pirate Party! Our SLP (speech and language pathologist) devised a treasure hunt for us. While we had a dance party, she came in and hid a bunch of pirate clues around the classroom and hid the pirate treasure in the kindergarten playground. The clues were simple enough for our 3-5 year olds to figure out (with supports).

Some of the clues were:

• Where do we put the trash? -- trash can
• I sail on the ocean. -- a big box we turned into a pirate ship
• I go "flush!" -- the handrail behind the toilet
• You can water the flowers with me -- watering can
• You climb up on me and then go down. Weee! -- Slide
• Look for a shovel and bucket in me-- sand box

It was awesome to be able to turn our fun party into a speech lesson as well. Inside of the treasure box were our party supplies. Balloons, pirate tattoos, face paint, Pirate's Booty, Ice Cream Cones, and an ice cream scoop (the ice cream was safe in the freezer!).

When we came back inside we had one heck of a preschool party! Complete with a Disney pirate themed CD that I just got on clearance at Party City for 50 cents!

Here are some images from our party! Enjoy!

Pirate Pipe Cleaners Counting - Download

Arrrggh!! Counting with Pirates!

We are working on counting, number sense, and 1-to-1 correspondence. What better way than with Pirate Pipe Cleaners!? I saw a post on Pintrest about taping number cards to pipecleaners and having the children string the corresponding # of beads onto the pipecleaner. I created our Pirate version with calendar pieces I found on http://www.makinglearningfun.com.

 I thought that the cards on Making Learning Fun were too big for my purposes, so I simply copied the image and pasted in on to a Word document and modified the size. Afterwards I laminated them and used white duct tape to tape each card to a pipecleaner. I decided to go with yellow and gold pipecleaners to represent "treasure". Instead of beads (which I did not transport with us to our summer school classroom) we used various sized buttons (which our SLP did bring to our summer school placement).

Sorry about the poor quality!

I also added dots to help the students count along, or check their work. Each card has the number of dots as the number listed.

Adaptations For Different Learning Needs

• Some learners just worked on stringing beads to foster fine motor skills
• Others who struggle with fine motor skills were asked to identify the numbers, or count the dots.
• You could adapt this as a sequencing activity too.