Ships Ahoy Game Pack

We ask students to listen roughly four hundred times a day and almost never teach them how.

"Listen up." "Are you listening?" "I need everybody listening." It is the most common instruction in our gyms and it is almost always delivered as a demand rather than a skill. Which is a strange thing to do, because listening has steps, and the students who struggle with it are usually not being defiant. They just never got shown what the steps are.

Ships Ahoy is how I teach those steps. Your gym becomes a ship, you become the captain, and your students become pirates in training. You call out a location or an action, they respond to it, and you bring them back to the captain's quarters whenever it is time to teach something new. That is the whole game. What makes it work is the sheer number of reps it produces. A class will respond to forty or fifty calls in a single lesson, and every one of them is a chance to practise tuning in, taking in, and checking in.

The thing you will see almost immediately is who is listening and who is copying. Students who have not heard the call watch their classmates and move half a second late, and that half second is visible from anywhere in the gym. Nobody has to be told they were not listening. They notice it themselves, because everyone else was already moving.

There is no elimination in this game, and that is deliberate. Nobody gets sent to the brig for missing a call. The whole value here is reps, and reps disappear the moment you start pulling kids out.

🧭 Build One: Learn The Ship. One location at a time. Bow, stern, port, starboard, and back to the captain's quarters. Students learn the geography of the ship before anything else is asked of them, and the directional vocabulary sticks in a way it never does from a diagram.

🧽 Build Two: All Hands On Deck. The individual action cards arrive. Now a call might send students running or it might drop them to the floor, so they have to actually hear it before they can decide what to do.

🪢 Build Three: Crew Calls. The group action cards, which require students to find a set number of partners before they can perform the action. The listening now has a deadline attached to it, and a student who missed the call has to get it from somebody else.

The command cards are the engine of the whole thing. Twenty of them, sorted by type, so you can hold the deck in your hand and build the lesson on the fly. They also double as your intensity dial. Hit The Deck and Cannonball bring the energy down, Kraken and Climb The Rigging send it back up, and you can read the room and call accordingly.

If you are looking for somewhere to put this, it lives beautifully in the first week of the year. I write more about how I open a school year in How I Start My School Year: Lesson One.

The pack includes the full game, all three builds with their diagrams, learning targets, discussion questions, assessment ideas, teacher notes, and the complete set of twenty command cards.

Happy Teaching!