Aaarghh! Learning the sound of ar

Wow! What a busy day we had on Tuesday!  It was so much fun though.  This week we are learning the sound of ar and Tuesday was a day filled with ar words. Monday night I had been looking for ideas to introduce the ar sound and came across The Inspired Apple's blog. She had some great ideas for teaching ar so I now I had a plan. I arrived at school early so I could hide ar words around the school and as soon as the kids come in they started chatting about the words they were seeing.  I had a large treasure map on the board.

They took turns finding the words, reading them aloud, and putting them on our treasure map.  I had put up a total of 16 words around the school so I told them we had to find all sixteen before we could open the treasure chest and see what was inside.  Throughout the morning we kept finding words and adding them to the map and by lunch we had found 15.  They tried to convince me to open the treasure chest but I held strong and told them we had to find all 16.  We made ar words on our Smartboard and even  sang a pirate song from Heidi's Songs.

To go along with our pirate song we made some really cute pirates and hung them in the hallway with our treasure map.

As we got closer to the time to go home the kiddos were getting very concerned about our treasure.  Fortunately Mr. Dawson showed up with a few minutes to spare with our last word, smart.  He said he had found it and didn't know what it was for.  He figured since first grade is sooo smart he thought
he would check with us to see if we knew anything about it.  Well..... we were very excited to say the least.  We finally were able to open our treasure chest and it was filled with another ar word.
                                                                Candy Bars!!!!