Here's my pictures!

Here are some shots of the pirate lapbook. It is made from 3 folders fit into each other because I wanted this to be a self-contained unit study. Put another way, I'm not particularly interested in pirates, but my son is.

So here are pictures of most of it:


On this spread, my son will define nautical and piratical terms and draw his own treasure map. I think he did the treasure map first!


On the right side of this one, he will write a summary about 13 famous/infamous pirates, one per flip page. There are questions on the front, inside, and back of each flip page about the person identified on the bottom. There is also a pirate play I found online for him to perform with his siblings or make puppets for and a "postcard" to draw and write as if he were a pirate writing home to his family.

The following picture has general pirate words like buccaneer, pirate, and privateer for him to define. He started this first but completed the treasure map first. Then the envelope (too big for the folder but I was out of small ones and didn't want to try to make one) has lists (printed online) of recommended reading for books and web sites. Most of the books are available from our library, and I X'ed the ones that weren't. Then he is to write a quick summary of 3 books and 2 web sites. Out of a list of around 40 options, that shouldn't be too hard! Hopefully he'll read more. (The web site that I got a lot of these ideas from was the Time Warp Trio one.)


The final page challenges him to look up the various Jolly Roger flags (which I have learned he already has) and then design his own.


Anyhoot, he's excited about it. The hardest part for me was actually sitting down and creating it. I kept thinking I needed to plan it out ahead of time, but I got bogged down in the planning. Once I threw planning out the window, I got it done!

Another thing I realized was that I didn't need to know all this stuff to include it. He is the one that is interested, and I am content with him being the expert. I know far more than I did a week ago, and I know how to find all the info so I can help him. As a college professor taught me, that is enough. Sometimes I need to be an expert but not always.