The Lighting of a Fire!: Part Thirty-One--Pirates of the Courageous Bein's 2003-2004

The Idea

In the spring of 2003 Karen and I sat in Olive Garden talking about what we might want to teach our children this year. We both had a bad taste in our mouth from the previous TJEd year, and this was to be Karen's last homeschool year, so we wanted it to pack a punch.

We wrote on a napkin as we talked about fulfilling one's mission on earth and living The Hero's Journey (see more below). We talked of Paul the apostle as the epitome of one who traveled many journeys, physical as well as spiritual as part of his great mission to preach the gospel to the Gentiles.

We eventually chose three people/times in history to focus on:

Paul and the ancient church of Christ/the ancient world

Joan of Arc and the apostasy/the medieval world

Joseph Smith and the restoration/the modern world

Later we met with Deena Ortiz and Dena Pedersen at my house to flesh out the year. The idea to focus on these three great heroes in history was great but as we sat discussing, it sounded really boring. Just before we broke for lunch Karen said, "What we need is a vehicle--a way to capture the children's imaginations. We need to be detectives or archeologists or astronauts discovering these heroes and learning from them." Yes, we needed something like that.

We walked into my kitchen to get lunch and there was Hal IV cleaning up or making lunch and playing the music from the recent movie, Pirates of the Caribbean. We all looked at each other and knew we needed to use that music in our school year. We went back to the French room and I think Karen was the one who came up with the idea that we would be pirates of the courageous beings traveling through time to capture our three heroes:

Paul, Joan and Joseph are tied to the mast head

on the year mind map which was inspired by...

...the pirate illustrations of N.C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle

After this Karen and I and the others saw this movie

several times in the theaters that summer--

We took notes throughout the movie in order to exploit

the pirate paraphernalia and witticisms for our school year.

Writing the curriculum

Deena, Amanda and Peter, Symbria during our writing week at Karen's home

(Symbria was there helping to get things ready for Sadie's wedding)

The Hero's Journey

After Karen read The Path of the Everyday Hero and other books about the hero's journey, she distilled and simplified the Hero's journey into five steps. We used these same five steps, though in various forms, in many school years beginning with Noble Birthright:

Prepare to Sail - Preparation - The hero is not a hero yet. He is untried and yet preparing to face trials in life by daily living with integrity and honor.

Enter if You Dare - The Call to Adventure - At some point in time the hero is faced with a call to action--a test or trial, a chance to stand up for truth, etc.

Aye, Aye, Captain - Commitment to the Call - The hero has a choice to face up to the trial presented or slip away or cave under pressure.

Ride Out the Storm - The Test - This is the hardest part of the trial because the hero never knows when the actual test will be over. He must persevere.

Land, Ho - Completion of the trial - The trial ends and the hero can celebrate, knowing that he road out the storm.

The hero's journey can be lived in a few minutes or many years, and it's possible that many hero's journeys can be simultaneously lived at the same time.

Pirate Handbook

While the rest of us wrote key points, etc., Karen put together

a pirate handbook for each person in our school group
(This was the first school handbook of my recollection, but it was not the last)

The book held the first-ever annotated school song, which clarified the symbolism.

The song was a fabulous hit as it is sung to the pirate movie theme song, which, interestingly, does not end with a resolution and therefore was unsuitable for our purposes. (The actual song in the movie ends when Captain Jack Sparrow puts his feet onto the dock near the early part of action.) However I taped the song and moved some of it around so that we could actually put words to it. It became one of our family's all-time favorite school songs and we sang it for many years.

The pirate movie's subtitle is "The Curse of the Black Pearl."
We changed our title to be "The Acquisition of the Pearl,"
meaning the acquisition of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

We used the phrases from the movie, as well as phrases from

the old Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland.

courageousbeings.com

A short time after this school year, a techno homeschool mom volunteered to put up a free website for us to share our curriculum and announce our workshop information. (Karen and I and sometimes Deena spoke at California Homeschool Network conferences, and other seminars and workshops). We called the site Courageous Beings. Later Karen switched the old site over to a homeschool repository of EPIC Adventures and free information and inspiration for educators. I helped Karen a little by writing articles and getting curricula publication ready. She put my bio here. Her full website is here: www.courageousbeings.com]

Opening Night

Our opening day of school just happened to be International Talk Like a Pirate Day, which is September 19th.

What's a Pirate's favorite letter of the alphabet? Aaaaaargh! ('r')

How much does it cost for a pirate to get his ears pierced? A buck-an-ear!!!

Our Captain Jack, Sadie's new husband Braden, was terrific! We got into a pirate mood by singing "A Pirate's Life for Me!" and listening to his invitation to go with him on an adventure to plunder history for some Courageous Bein's. Along the way he delivered many one-liners from the movie. It was a fun, if silly night.

Sadie and Braden

Until now I hadn't realized that Braden was our visitor on Karen's last school year opening day, and nine years later, in 2012, he was our visitor on my last school year opening day.

Autumn Heather kneels (in white); Hal captures all on videotape; and Chase kneels

while Jack interrogates Tatiana Ortiz!

After an introduction to the year there were pirate-y group activities outside

Hal IV

Chase

Before our family arrived at this opening day I talked to Hal IV and Chase about school and the theme. They were doing more scholar-phase type work, (a term taken from Thomas Jefferson Education), and I told them they were welcome to join in with the theme if they wanted to.

That night Chase said to me, "Mom, you tricked us! You chose something that we were already obsessed with, [the pirate movie and music], so that we would want to be a part of this school year!"

Chase's smile can be seen even from behind!

Vanessa Ortiz, Ashley Kindrick, and Hal IV look at their handbooks. Sadie films.

Here is an excerpt of a letter I wrote to Amber and Jasmyn that night:

Amanda and Mark (Amakasu) were there. When I was getting ready to go home Mark asked me if I would still be schooling when his little baby Peter was five years old. I said I would, and he was so glad because he said that our families would be able to school together! Isn't that cute?

Interestingly, though I never imagined that we really would, we did have two school years with the Amakasu family.

Autumn Heather, Giselle, Jack Sparrow, Chase, Hal IV

Dena, me, Karen, Jack, Deena

Alive Lessons

I wrote the Joan of Arc component for the year as well as mini lessons to be shared once a week at the beginning of the school day. These were called Alive Lessons--alive, meaning a person is alive to the world, versus dead and walking around. For example, during our first week I shared Hyrum W. Smith's I-beam story, except that I changed the I-beam to a plank, as in "walk the plank." We worked on discovering our governing values by deciding the things we would be willing to walk the plank for. (You can read the I-beam story here.)

We had Alive Lessons every day the first week and also worked through our pirate handbooks. We also gathered our pirate accoutrements. Our first week was a mini component about what pirates did, and even though we didn't really want to emulate pirates, the theme was sure a kid-grabber.

Some of us made our own Aztec coins out of clay. (Back then we couldn't purchase those gold coins online the way we can now).

Giselle "Jack Sparrow" Bradley on Halloween night

Autumn Heather with the maps of Paul's journeys in the background.

This picture is actually a Daddy-Autumn Heather birthday date,

but it shows the bookcase holding a school lesson about the gifts of the Spirit.

Projects/Inquiries

I videotaped several things from this year, but didn't take too many photos. I remember making things like baklava that year, but I would have to go to the kids' binders and to the videos to see more of the inquiry work.

Autumn Heather and Giselle dressed up for a movie Autumn Heather made

during our study of Paul and the ancient world.

We made clay oil lamps and lit them.

Hal IV and Chase took some scholar classes from Deena Ortiz during this school year, and our family attended their scholar class presentation at the end of the semester.

I'm not sure whether Hal IV put together this project on the rulers of England for his scholar class or if he did this on his own. He presented it to us during our study of Joan of Arc which was perfect since she fought in the Hundred Year's War. His project inspired and preceded a similar project by Autumn Heather several years later during our Shakespeare year.

Our Joan component was another excuse to learn this poem. There are some poems we learn over and over in cycles for the benefit of the younger children. I think this is the year Hal IV wrote some really good verses for the three missing monarchs:

Edward VIII, George VI, and Elizabeth II.

I found many other poems and scriptures in my pirate year binder.

They looked mostly like this:

Literature Time

I only remember the three major books--one for each component--that I read to the four children.

The Silver Chalice is about the Last Supper cup.

I was given the recommendation to read this book and we plowed through it

hoping it would get better, but in the end none of us really liked it at all.

Today I could read fifty online reviews of many books to save us from this trouble--

c'est la vie!

We all enjoyed Mark Twain's Joan of Arc,

But the best book to me was The History of Joseph Smith by His Mother.

We finished reading the rest of it during the early summer when I read while the kids pulled their daily, morning weeds!

Thematic Pajamas

This was the first year that I made our annual Christmas jammies match our school year theme. The kids got pirate pjs and an eye patch on Christmas eve, and I didn't even have to ask them to pose for pirate pictures.

Aaaarrrrgh!