Pirates!!

We had a visitor in Manuka! 

She had a funny hat, a loud voice, and wore an eye patch!  You guessed it - it was a pirate captain!  Captain Blood visited our class with a HUGE problem!  Her crew had been involved in a massive battle with another pirate crew and had their boat scuttled!  What good is a Pirate Captain without a ship?  She needed our help to solve the problem.  She gave us instructions about the size of the boat she needed, a cutlass each, and off we set to design her a new ship.  It was so handy that the cutlass each group got was one metre long!  After we drew up plans for the boat, the correct size, we could add features such as a crows nest, anchor and a plank!

Captain Blood had such a good time that she came back the next day, armed with her set of handy measuring cutlasses, and a big box of cannon balls.  We had a competition to see how far we could fire them on the back field.  It was really handy that the Sports Trust Coaches had been and shown us how to successfully throw a shot put, which looked remarkably like the cannon balls.  We fired them as far as we possibly could, then using our measuring cutlass, checked how far we could throw them. 

After that, Captain Blood got a bit cross and made us all 'walk the plank'.  The sharks were swirling directly underneath the plank, so we had to jump as far as we could.  Again, those measuring cutlasses came in really handy and we measured how far we could jump.  It was lucky that the sharks weren't really real, as it was pretty tricky to jump a long way.

Check out our pirate ship plans!!

We had such a great time with Captain Blood that Mrs Webb organised a 'Pirate Discovery'.  It's not often that we get to do discovery so we were pretty jolly excited!  We had so many ideas about what activities we could do, and Mrs Webb tried her hardest to accomodate all of them.  She just couldn't manage to rustle up an actual pirate ship to play on.  However, we drew treasure maps, built pirate ships, searched for piratey words and played 'Pop Up Pirate' among other things.  It was such fun, working together, creating and playing.