What are the best pirate themed books for a very imaginative nursery class who are regularly seeking treasure and sailing the seas on their climbing frame at playtime?
Imagining that the everyday is something special and different is a familiar theme in stories and poems for children and especially in picture books.
The poet Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Counterpane in which he describes a child who is sick in bed playing with his toys and imaging them to be real is a good example: “And sometimes sent my ships in fleets/ All up and down among the sheets;/ Or brought my trees and houses out,/ And planted cities all about”.
Stevenson reflects what anyone watching children play can see as they readily create small worlds for their dolls or trains or Lego characters to play in and tell the stories about them as they do so.
For a great story to fuel a nursery class as they collectively embark on “imagining” ships Quentin Blake’s The Green Ship would be a wonderful starting point. Although it is set in a garden and not a playground it is full of the some magical possibilities of make believe and imagination. Although there are no pirates in it, nonetheless, it has a great spirit of adventure.
Historically, pirates were generally baddies so it is not surprising that traditionally they get a bad press – while also being dashing and heroic! However, in Kristina Stephenson’s Sir Charlie Stinky Socks: The Pirate’s Curse, the latest adventure for the jolly young knight with the trademark dashing socks, the pirate captain who has put the message in the bottle simply saying “HELP!” is actually a secret baker who has to hide his delicious cakes and biscuits from his crew for fear they will think he is soft. Luckily, he finds a way of making his cakes into ammunition and then everyone is happy.
For a riotous imaginative adventure, Captain Flinn and the Pirate Dinosaurs, the first in an excellent series by Giles Andreae and Russell Ayto, tells how Flinn meets Pirate Captain Stubble while looking for some coloured paper in the school stationery cupboard.
Flinn is immediately enlisted to help his ship the Acorn back and is even made a Captain himself as he swashbuckles across the seas before returning to the stationary cupboard. And it all happens without the teacher even noticing…
Peter Harris’s The Night Pirates, with illustrations by Deborah Allwright, is another adventure showing just how bold pirates can be. Here Tom wakes up to find pirates at work stealing the front of his house – useful as a disguise when sailing towards other pirates! These are bold pirates. And they are girls, too. Soon Tom is sailing across the sea with them as they set off to steal from the adult pirate Captain Patch and his lazy pirate crew.
John Ryan’s Captain Pugwash, the first title in the series about the eponymous pirate captain of the Black Pig and his never-ending piratical grudge match against Cut-throat Jake, remains a classic model for all pirate stories. In subsequent titles such as Captain Pugwash and the Birthday Party and Pugwash Aloft Cabin Boy Tom is always on hand to come up with a cunning plan that will save his accident-prone Captain from the worst of the disasters.
All pirate stories provide wonderful scope for dressing up, acting out and having a thoroughly good and swashbuckling time. As long as it is only make-believe!
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