Arrrrrgh! & Ahoy!

Mikie finished The Magic Tree House book #4 Pirates Past Noon back in May; however, due to our numerous travels and uncooperative weather the "field trip" for this one was postponed until we returned from Disney (I finally fixed that post so you have my permission to go back and look at it now :) .

Now, the field trip to Medieval Times was still my favorite teaching opportunity, but this one was a very close second. In the Baltimore Harbor, only a few hours from our house, we set sail on a pirate adventure cruise where the boys followed a map to find the buried treasure. Mikie with his pirate book

The "crew"

My pirates on a very hot afternoon.

Long John Silvers would be so proud!

Video of "ALL HANDS ON DECK:"

Mikie checks the map and our research guide book for the hidden "X"

My child intently telling one of the pirates which page he can find the map on in his book.

Let the cannon fight commence.

Video of cannon fight:

Zachary is copying Daddy trying to look for the treasure.

There it is! (see the x marks the spot?)

Time to pull the treasure up from the water.

Using the keys that we got back from the pirate thief during the water cannon battle. Each child got to dig a handful of treasure out of the chest.

Zachary was quite happy with the rings from his handful of treasure.

There was one more treasure to find: Pirate Pete's Grog (cherry coke)

Time for some fun and games: limbo!

We all had a great time and got to see all the parts of the ship listed in our book. When we got home, Mikie wanted to have his own treasure hunt around the house.

Book #5 Night Of The Ninjas Our field trip after Mikie completed this book was so much of a bust that I didn't even take any pictures of it. I looked on line and found a martial arts competition that was in the Annapolis/Baltimore area so I assumed it would be well organized and highly competitive so Mikie could see a lot of the weapons that are used. I was very wrong! We were in the area the night before for a retirement ceremony anyway, so we just spent the night with Michael's Aunt and Uncle and got up the next morning to drive to the competition. When we arrived at 10:00 am, according to the schedule they were suppose to be 30 minutes into the program with the weapons portion coming up. Well..........they were running late....very late....as in almost 2 hours late! So we walked to a nearby waterfront park and killed some time looking at ducks on the water until we headed back inside and watched about 10 minutes of the performances. We did get to see a competitor practicing in the hallway we were watching from (because I was NOT going to pay $20 a person to watch 15 minutes of this thing before having to leave for lunch and nap time). When the high school aged boy took a break from twirling and tossing his weapons, we asked for his autograph and then left. I wish I would have gotten his picture too. Oh well, it was my least favorite MTH book anyway!