CRESTVIEW — Glenda Nibert's fifth-grade class at Riverside Elementary School celebrated International Talk like a Pirate Day on Thursday with plenty of pirate talk and snacks.
Students divided in small groups to script pirate stories peppered with words like buccaneer or ahoy.
WATCH Riverside Elementary School teacher Glenda Nibert and her students read pirate stories>>
Nibert, a first-year teacher, said the activity helps students cultivate writing and reading skills.
For students, “it was really fun," Mikayla Long, 10, said.
Mikayla’s group wrote about boy pirates competing with girl pirates for ownership of a vessel.
"The girls end up winning the boat and sailing away," she said. "It was real easy to write."
Prior to the exercise, Mikayla was unaware of the holiday, but she grew fond of using the phrase, "shiver me timbers."
Hayden Underhill, 10, enjoyed saying “matey” in his group's story about two girls captured by pirates while at the beach; the girls make it back to the beach safely after escaping their captors.
Caitlyn Guthrie, 10, said the exercise challenged her group to use unfamiliar terms.
"We had to find ways to use words like scallywag,” she said, referring to the synonym of rascal.
She also found some of the terminology — like pirates’ word for a ship’s weather deck — humorous.
"Poop deck — it just sounds really funny," she said.
Contact News Bulletin Staff Writer Matthew Brown at 850-682-6524 or matthewb@crestviewbulletin.com. Follow him on Twitter @cnbMatthew.
This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: Riverside fifth-graders practice pirate language skills (VIDEO)