aARgh! It's what a pirate says!

An important sound we teach in 1st grade is the sound 'ar' makes. To help kids remember this sound we refer to it as the "pirate sound." This year we decided to dedicate a week to a pirate theme to help our students learn and remember this important sound!

We read pirate books at read aloud time, read pirate themed books during reading groups, made pirate hats, made a list of 'ar' words, had a pirate themed PE game, wrote about what we would say, wear and do if we were pirates, went on a treasure hunt for 'ar' words, made a pirate to look like ourselves, illustrated a picture to go with a pirate poem and wrote a pirate story together.

Here are pictures from some of our pirate adventures this past week.

We created a list of many words with the 'ar' sound!

 We made our own lists of our favorite 'ar' words. We also created pirate hats we wore all week!

Then we used our list and our creative minds to create ourselves as pirates. I was impressed with their creativity. One student purposely left an arm off, claiming he was a one-armed pirate!

On Wednesday we answered clues from our treasure map and went out into our school to find our treasure. Below is an example of how the treasure looked throughout the school. Each 1st grade class had a different color of clues/treasure.

Here students are searching for their treasure!

Students returned to show off their clue and treasure!

We added our treasure to our treasure map!

To end our week we wrote a story together using what we had learned about pirates and our 'ar' words we found in our treasure hunt!

Hope you had fun enjoying our pirate adventure! Sorry for not posting in awhile, upon returning from spring break we were so busy with a unit on force and motion that I forgot to take pictures and blog! Hoping to get back to our weekly posts! :)

Writing Like Laura Numeroff

Laura Numeroff is one of my favorite children's book authors. The week before winter break we read A LOT of stories she wrote. Below are some of the titles we read:

Her books are catchy, funny and teach kids a wonderful writing style. Students quickly caught on to her patterns and identified these rules to follow if we were to write a story like Laura Numeroff.

• The title should start with "If you give..."
• She has one animal and one girl or boy in each story.
• The first letter of the food, should have the same first letter as the animal.
• It always ends with "and chances are..." and connects back to the first thing you gave the animal.
• One thing leads to another. 

They wrote a wonderful story (I only took notes and typed it up. They really wrote it all by themselves!) and illustrated it. It is now bound in our classroom. Feel free to come and check it out! Below is each page of the story: