Unit study: Pirates

Although I unofficially did a lot of homeschooling while my kids were in preschool, I “officially” became a homeschooling mom when my son entered kindergarten and my daughter entered transitional kindergarten in the fall of 2014. The first unit we completed as an official homeschooling family was our pirates unit.

For all of my units, I like my kids to know some of the history and/or science behind the topic we were studying. Well, given that I like my kids to have an accurate historical understanding of the topic we are studying, I’m not sure choosing pirates was the best idea. 🙂 After all, a lot of pirates were pretty nasty people who did some really terrible things!

My kids and I did have several an age-appropriate talks about the unsavory parts of pirate life. You may choose to do the same, or you can avoid the bad stuff and just stick with the fun stuff. A pirate unit presents plenty of wonderful learning opportunities even if you avoid some of the not-so-nice stuff. My kids and I definitely founds lots of fun and wholesome learning opportunities while studying pirates.

If you are planning a pirate unit study, I hope you will find some useful ideas below. Although my kids were four and five when we did this unit study, many of these ideas can be adapted for kids both older and younger.

I combined our learning about pirates with some introductory geography lessons. After all, pirates need to be able to read maps in order to navigate the waters! Some of the geography lessons we completed are included below, but you’ll find a longer list of geography activities on my Geography Unit Study page.

My learning objectives for our pirate lessons included:

Kids will know what pirates are
Kids will be familiar with items commonly associated with pirates such as pirate ships, telescopes, and treasure chests
Kids will learn vocabulary for the parts of a ship

Along with learning about pirates specifically, I had several other learning objectives in the areas of science and social studies:

Kids will learn about maps and directions (because pirates had to navigate the waters)
Kids will learn the science behind telescopes (because pirates needed to be able to see into the distance)
Kids will learn about density (because pirates needed to know what would sink and what would float)

Below you will find all of the pirate-related posts that have been featured at Gift of Curiosity.