Bossy R activities for first grade can be fun and engaging when you add a cute story like The Bossy R Sisters! This lesson on r-controlled vowels was a hit with my first grade students and it's sure to help your students learn all about this spelling pattern too.
R-controlled vowels can be difficult for first graders. They all sound so similar and it can be confusing to kids. It's important, when teaching this literacy skill, to give your students lots of visual clues to help them remember the difference between ar, or, ir, er and ur.
How To Teach R-Controlled Vowels
When I teach “ar” I always tell the students it makes the sound like a pirate….arrrrgh! And when I teach “or” that is a pretty simple sound because it is the same as the word or. But, when you get to the three tricky ones – ir, er, and ur how do you tell the difference? So that is how The Bossy R Sisters were born.
We started our lesson with one of our favorite YouTube characters Geraldine The Giraffe. She's a cute puppet that's learning about letters, sounds and words. Her videos are quick (only a few minutes long) but they pack a lot of punch in their lessons. They're also funny and the kids love them!
We also watched this controlling r video as a quick review of all the bossy r sounds.
Afterwards, we reviewed our anchor chart for Bossy R. We've been working for about two weeks on this chart. Each time we learned one of the new bossy r sounds, we added a new column to our chart.
The Story Of The Bossy R Sisters
Next it was time to introduce the story of the Bossy R Sisters! This simple little story is about 3 sisters who – you guessed it – like to boss the vowels around. But they're also helpful…..one sister is a teacher, one is a nurse, and one is a firefighter girl.
The story of the Bossy R sisters includes picture cards and as I told the story to the students, I put the pictures in the pocket chart. After the story, I gave each of the students a “bossy r” word to read and match to a picture.
Bossy R Activities
Next, I paired the students up and they moved to a table to play the game “Who's The Boss”, a cute little game where they read bossy r words to get to the finish. We love to play partner games to reinforce skills in our class. The best thing is that the game is differentiated into three levels, so I could pair kids by ability.
We also practiced the bossy r rule with some hands on task cards. The kids used magnetic letters to fill in the missing letters on these task cards.
When we were finished, the students did a quick assessment using these differentiated worksheets.
I hope this gave you some ideas on how to help your students learn the sounds of Bossy R. If you'd like to do this lesson with your own class, you can take a closer look at it here.
