Support children in your service or classroom to unleash their inner pirates for Talk Like a Pirate Day (19 September)! From treasure chests to maps and sailing ships, the topic of pirates is a great source of early STEM inpiration for children. Read on for Little Scientists’s age-appropriate pirate-inspired STEM activities to try in your setting.
Planning other pirate STEM activities for your children? Join Little Scientists’ Facebook group “Early STEM Educators Network” to exchange engaging STEM ideas with other educators about Talk Like a Pirate Day and STEM education.
ACTIVITY: Guess the pirate’s treasure (0-3 years)
The aim of this activity is to hide an object in a box and encourage the children to use their sense of touch to explore the object and try to guess what it is! This supports children’s curiosity, sense of wonder, and hypothesising skills. Younger babies and toddlers may not verbalise their ideas or questions, but you will be able to notice these in their facial expressions.
Materials:
📦 Shoe box or small box. Cut a hole on the top or side big enough for a child’s hand to fit through.
📦 Objects with different textures, such as:
- Fluffy balls
- Scarves
- Smooth metallic balls
- Jute or rattan balls
- Small soft toys
- Pinecones
- Carpet samples
- CDs
Instructions:
- Place a different object in each box.
- Encourage children to place their hand in a box and explore the object hidden inside.
- For younger children: Notice their reactions and name these. For example: “Oh, you didn’t like the feel of that! Did it tickle you?” or “You look like you know what that is!” or “Hmmm, you look like you’re thinking about what you’re feeling”.
- For older children: Encourage them to describe what they’re feeling.
- Once the children have had a feel, take the object out of the box and explore it with the children. Model descriptive language, for example: “It’s a very bumpy pinecone” or “the scarf is very fluffy”.
ACTIVITY: Find the pirate’s treasure (3+ years)
This fun activity encourages children to use their communication skills, visual literacy, counting, and sequencing to guide their peers to find the hidden treasure.
With younger children or children developing their communication skills, educators may need to provide the initial scaffolding to help them practice and understand the concept of the activity. For example, the educator may be the guide for the first few turns.
Materials:
🏴☠️ Something to use as the treasure. This can be anything at all! Encourage the children to select what they will use for the treasure.
🏴☠️ Masking tape or chalk (to mark the starting spot)
🏴☠️ An arrow sign (we recommend A4 size to make them easily seen)
🏴☠️ A STOP sign
Instructions:
- Designate one child as the “seeker” and ask them to close their eyes as the treasure is hidden.
- Once the treasure is hidden, designate a child to be the “guide”.
- Ask the seeker to stand on the starting spot.
- The guide gives the seeker instructions using words, gestures, and the arrow card. For example: “Three steps this way”.
- When the seeker is as close to the treasure as possible, the guide holds up the STOP sign to let the seeker know they are in the right place to “dig up” the treasure.
Extend the activity: Ask the children to draw a map for the seeker to use, instead of verbal instructions. Children can draw “landmarks” from the room such as tables or cabinets on the map and mark the path from the starting point to the treasure using arrows.
With older children, this can also be done as a whole group activity with one seeker and several children taking turns to be the guide. This provides additional complexity for the children providing instructions as they need to build on the previous instruction provided by another child.
ACTIVITY: Make a pirate ship (3+ years)
Try this hands-on STEM challenge to encourage children’s creativity and engineering skills!
Materials:
⛵ Masking tape
⛵ Glue
⛵ Scissors
⛵ A tray, trough, or container with water
For this experience, we encourage you to set up a small “material buffet” from which children can select 3-4 items to create their ship. The list below is to spark ideas for different materials that can be made available. Choose 5-7 items from the list below or add your own based on what you have available!
Material buffet ideas:
- Corks
- Small twigs or sticks
- Large leaves
- Paddle pop sticks or tongue depressors
- Milk bottle caps
- Cardboard offcuts, rolls, or small boxes (such as from toothpaste tubes)
- Berry or tomato punnet containers
- Paper cups
- Pipe cleaners
- Twine, string or yarn
Instructions:
- Encourage children to select 3-4 items from the material buffet to use to make their own pirate ship. Explain that the ships can look however the children would like, but the important thing is that the ship should be able to float on water.
- Once constructed, test the ships in the water tray, trough, or container with the children.
- Children may refine their ships further after testing or create new ones based on how their ships fare on the water.
Extend the activity: Explore the effect that air has on the ships by providing each child with a straw or small handheld fan. Encourage them to blow their ships across the water using these items and see who can move their ship the furthest!
ACTIVITY: Eye patch challenge (3+ years)
Help children explore the human body and how their eyes help them navigate the space around them.
Interesting information for adults: Our brain uses the information from both eyes to help us judge the distance between objects we see. This is our “depth perception”. The information from both our eyes is sent back to the brain to help us understand the 3D world around us. When we cover one eye, this impacts our depth perception as we send a limited amount of information back to the brain. We may see some things as further or closer than they really are from us.
For this reason, it’s important that before commencing the activity, you should ensure that there is adequate space in the area you’re using so children don’t trip or bump into obstacles. As depth perception is impacted when using eye patches, it’s easy for children to misjudge distance.
This activity can also support children to learn about people with low-vision and demonstrate that while there may be differences in their perception of the surrounding environment, with adjustments they are still able to engage in most of the same activities as sighted people. Further information about inclusive environments for people with low-vision can be found on Vision Australia’s website here.
Materials:
🔎 Eye patches (you can make these with cardboard and elastic). These should only be worn for short periods of time (less than 10 minutes) as patching an eye for longer can cause strain on the non-patched eye.
🔎 Soft balls or balloons
🔎 A low beam (on the ground and no higher!) or masking tape
Instructions:
- Encourage children to practise throwing and catching balls or balloons without the eye patch. Then encourage them to put on their eye patch and try again. What happens? Do they notice any difference? Does it make a difference if they swap the eye that the patch is on?
- Now try ‘walking the gangplank’ on a low beam or a masking tape line without wearing the eye patch. How easy or hard is it to see the beam/line and balance on it? Now try again while wearing the eye patch. Again try swapping the patch to the other eye. Is there any difference?
BOOK: “Ten Little Pirates” (3+ years)
Still looking for more pirate STEM inspiration? Read “Ten Little Pirates” by Mike Brownlow and Simon Rickerty (illustrator) to explore counting, acoustics, and colours with 10 adorable pirates!
Develop your STEM skills with pedagogy-based STEM PD:
- Browse our in-person STEM workshops.
- Browse our online STEM workshops.
- Browse our online STEM Hours.
- Book an in-service workshop for your team.
- Book a STEM Family Workshop for your families.
