pirate pAARRRty time!

Take a look at a few of our pirates before we went on an "ar" treasure hunt around the school.
Our kite strings are in the way, but you get the idea!

Pirate week was such a blast! We read tons of pirate books, we spoke like pirates ALL week, we played pirate games, we did pirate crafts and we finished off our week with a Pirate Paaarrrty!! It was a BLAST! One of our favorite weeks of the year, hands down! 

Each student made a pirate hat and got a pirate eye patch! We bought these items through out the year when we found them on sale at crafts stores and party stores. It was great to pull out our pirate box and have everything we needed! 

Many students tried to wear black and red.
Most brought bandanas too!

This sweet girl went all out!
She wore her pirate costume!
Too cute!!

Ready for our
Treasure Hunt!

On the look out for AR words!

Wrong map... "This is not a treasure map, it's the United States!"

X marks the spot!

Back in the classroom we finished our treasure map!

Listing our AR words
from the treasure hunt. 

Finishing our Pirate craft
from Babbling Abby's unit!

It's time to pAARRRRty!

Pirate Punch and Tattoos!

Snacks, pirate coins, loot bags and even a treasure from the treasure box!

Overall, it was an awesome week of learning! A phonics pattern the will never forget! We wish phonics was always this fun! So glad we bought the Pirate Pack from the Inspired Apple because it has so many great ideas! Our only regret was we forgot to take a picture of US! We were to busy trying to capture all of the fun we forgot to take a picture of the ourselves all dressed up! ARRGH!

This week we are learning about Ezra Jack Keats and his beautiful collage illustrations. We are still learning about the "bossy r" phonics pattern this week. We will keep you posted! Have a fantastic week!

UP KITE UP!

Hey frugal followers!  Sorry for my lack of posts lately - I'm trying to get back into the swing of things after a long (but not long enough) spring break!  The weather was definitely NOT on our side this past week! Although the sun was shining, the temps were too chilly for the beach!  However, we did manage to make it to the beach once toward the end of the week (as you might have seen in Melissa's post)... it was well worth the wait!  We had a blast!

Any-hoo, I wanted to catch you all up on a fun and exciting project we did right before we went on (a much needed) break.  As many of you know, my classroom theme is frogs.  I am also a BIG fan of the Frog and Toad series by Arnold Lobel.  They are just so darn cute!  Our main selection that week just happened to be "The Kite" from Days with Frog and Toad.  With our focus skill on problem and solution that week we decided to create this adorable little KITE story maps!

     

This was an idea I came up with my first year teaching (waaaay back in 2008).  Over the years we've made modifications to make them fit with certain skills we are trying to teach at that time.   This year we divided the kite into four sections - one for characters, setting, problem, and solution.  Students had to draw and write about each topic in the corresponding sections.  For those of you who aren't familiar with the story - Frog and Toad want to fly a kite.  It doesn't work on the first try and Toad is ready to give up.  Frog encourages Toad to keep trying, and finally... on the fourth try, the kite goes up when Toad yells "UP KITE UP"!  On each try, Toad tries something new to make the kite fly.  This year, on the bow ties, we described each "attempt" at flying the kite.  In the past, I've used the bow ties as a BME and had the students describe the beginning, middle, and end of the story.  You could also use them to record words from the story that follow a particular spelling pattern.  There are so many options!!! Each student was responsible for making their own (which they absolutely LOVED!!!).  Of course I modeled an example during whole group before sending my little firsties off independently.  We talked about the importance of using the book as a reference to help them complete their kites.  Here's a glimpse at some of my kiddos at work... 

 

 

 Here's a close up of the final product...

I used large construction paper to cut out the kites ahead of time (took about 5 minutes... if that) and I wrote the headings myself.  You could have the kids write the heading themselves if you'd rather... I just chose to do it ahead of time.  Our kites are now hanging from our classroom ceiling and they turned out to be fantastic decorations!  Each year, this turns out to be one of their favorite projects.  They all wanted to go out and see if they'd fly!  Melissa ended up taking her class out to fly real kites in the PE field hahaha it was amazing and chaotic all at the same time!!! Picture 19 kids running around with 19 different kite strings on a windy day and one teacher tangled up in the middle of all of it!!! haha It was the perfect way to finish the week and head out on spring break!  Hope you all had a wonderful spring break - hang in there, summer is right around the corner!

First Grade Buccaneers

AHOY Matey's! As you have probably already guessed, it's pirate week in our classrooms!! This is one of our favorite weeks of the year! We have been stalking up on pirate gear all year! Every time we see something on sale we grab it! We have pirate hats, eye patches, pirate tattoos, pirate stickers, pirate treasure maps, compasses, and pirate pAARRRty supplies! It's going to be such a fun week!

Today was a teacher work day we had a chance to get everything ready for a fun filled week of PHONICS!!!

A bunch of fabulous bloggers like Babbling Abby, Erica Bohrer, Michelle Oaks and The Teacher Wife (Lindsey) have already shared some fabulous ideas! Why recreate the wheel? We bought Abby's fabulous Pirate Pack last year and plan on using it again this year to focus our entire week around
pirates!!! Last year it proved to be one phonics pattern our kiddos NEVER forgot!

Tomorrow we are going to start our literacy block by introducing our new phonics pattern (r-controlled vowels /ar/) by reading "How I became a Pirate"

We have a bunch of other great read alouds for the week, too! After we introduce the spelling pattern we are going to do some fun online pirate activities to become more "pirate educated"! We are going to practice talking like pirates and mainly focus on "ARRRRR" which means a few things in "pirate" but we are going to focus on the "yes" and "I agree" version. We will also learn a few other pirate terms such as "AYE AYE" which means "I'll get right on that" and "AVAST" which means "check it out." And of course "Ahoy" for hello and "Matey" for friend/buddy! All of this information was found on Talk LIke A Pirate. It's also fun to use the Pirate Translator.

We are going to incorporate a little WHOLE BRAIN TEACHING/LEARNING by doing a little partner "mirror" and "teach" with the sounds of /ar/ in our best pirate voices! We will also bring in some Kagan learning by doing some rally robin with /ar/ words that sound like a pirate and words that sound like "air".         

  Examples:Yard/Garden/Tar and Care/Fare/Stare. We will use a T-Chart to record our new learning. 

We are going to give our students a few minutes to makeup their own pirate friend "matey".

To download Click Here

It will give them a chance to be creative! We plan to keep you updated on all of our fun activities this week! Stay tuned for more matey's! We hope ye would like to join us in teaching these lads some new things! Yo Ho Ho!

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