Shiver me timbers, Grammy Camp was fun!
Sunday evening began the festivities with a treasure hunt to find their treasure chests. Inside they found a pirate hat, eye patch, telescope, back pack, and bottle with their Proverbs 7:1 verse. Bucko (Lane), Buccaneer (Eli) and Squidlips (Corbin) painted their treasure chests and decorated their back packs.
Every morning after breakfast we would go over our verse, read a pirate book, and do some kind of activity. I had lots of things planned so we kept busy. Monday was our nature treasure hunt and the only day the weather allowed us to go to the beach. After the beach we read “The Gingerbread Pirates” by Kristin Kladstrup. We made gingerbread dough, cut out our pirates and were just getting ready to bake them when my power went out. After a few minutes when it hadn’t gone back on I called the utility company only to find out it would be a few hours until it went back on. 🙁 We covered the cookies and headed out to eat dinner at a restaurant in town. On our way out of my subdivision we saw that a large tree had fallen on the wires cutting off power to all of us in the dunes.
After dinner we headed to the elementary school playground to burn off some energy! 
From there we went to Dairy Queen to get ice cream cones.
By the time we got home at 9pm the power was back on!
Tuesday was rainy so that was going to be our St. Joseph day to go the children’s Discovery Zone, ride the carousel, have a picnic lunch and go on a scavenger hunt downtown St. Joe.
For you locals, here is the link to my treasure map for downtown St. Joe: St. Joe treasure hunt 2015
Later that day we did get to bake and decorate our cookies.:)
One of our favorite activities was the exploding treasure chests. I froze layers of baking soda mixed with water and a packet of kool-aid. I modified it from this site to put in pans instead of ice cube trays. http://3boysandadog.com/homeschool-unit-study-pirates-activities-preschool-boys/ In each layer I put little toys and trinkets and froze it. I made about 4 layers.
I gave me hearties a squeeze bottle of vinegar. As they squeezed the vinegar out the block it started to fizz uncovering the toys I had hidden. Blimey, those pirates went through 1 1/2 gallons of vinegar in no time. So we piled in me car and headed to Meijer to buy each pirate their own gallon of vinegar.
One night we watched a pirate movie, each pirate in their own ship munching on their movie necklace. (Each pirate strung cereal, cookies, pretzels and gummy life savers onto some yarn to wear and munch on during the movie).
Another fun art project we did with each boy’s hand:
We enjoyed some “pirate”food:
I also made shark teeth out of “Buggles” covered in melted white chocolate; pirate ships out of hot dogs in buns with cheese as the sail; deviled eggs pirate ship with flags, pretzel stick peg legs; Pirate Booty brand of mac-n-cheese.
Since it was too cold and rainy to go to the beach the rest of the week, I had to modify our color treasure hunt. We were going to look for colored rocks on the beach but we launched colored cannons (water balloons) instead. I think it was more fun than looking for rocks and the boys would probably agree! Thanks to my friend, Abbey for lending us her science project!
One of our last activities was a treasure hunt to find gold doubloons around the house and something far more valuable than gold or silver.
Me mateys did many more activities, most you can find on my Pinterest board titled “Grammy Camp.”
After we finished cleaning up at the end of our time, Eli said, “What are we going to do next year Grammy?” Aaaarrrgggghhhh, at least I have a year to think about it!
On the journey,
Trish
