Bossy AR Bible Reader

My first grader and I worked on Lesson 7 of my Phonics by The Book curriculum last week. This lesson recounts the earlier years of Moses (from Exodus1-4) and focuses on the bossy ar pattern, while reviewing short a words.

*This is a series I originally posted YEARS ago on This Reading Mama. My goal is to revise it and add more to it. But for now, I’m just moving it to its new home here.

*Click on the green download button towards the BOTTOM of this post to download this lesson.

In this post, you’ll find:

God Heard Their Cries reader (with a focus on AR words)
printables & activities for reinforcing AR words
printables & activities to coincide with sight words (most are from Fry’s first 100 Sight Word & Pre-Primer/Primer lists)
writing ideas & prompts
a focal Bible Verse (Psalm 40:1) with activities
A lesson outline that gives a plan for spacing out the activities over the week (Note: Don’t stress out and feel like you have to do all of these activities. We certainly don’t. You are more than welcome to pick and choose what you want to use.)

READER: God Heard Their Cries

Before reading for the first time, I underlined words in the text to discuss the meaning when I read the text. On subsequent days, I gave over more and more responsibility to him.

BOSSY R (AR): If you like this sort, these are the same kind of sorts you’ll find in Words Their Way & all their supplement books. I highly recommend these!

Day 1: Just to clarify, we do our word study/sorting portion BEFORE the reader each day. The only exception would be day 4–the word hunt.

Bossy ar/short a sort: All of these words can be found in the reader. We sorted the words by having the pattern ar or short a.

I modeled first (keeping the oddball category & words out of the sort) reading each word, looking for the patterns, and he finished the sort. He read all the words after sorting and we discussed the meaning of a few words that were unknown to him. Then, I introduced the oddball category.

I added the oddball words (saw & war) into the shuffle and he re-sorted with support.

He was so proud of himself for finding the oddballs!

Day 2: Re-sort & Find Patterns

He re-sorted with support and used do-a-dot paint to color code the two patterns featured in the sort.

Day 3

Little Words Activity with MARCHING. Ahead of time, I cut apart the letters and mixed them up so he wouldn’t know what word all the letters spelled.

He makes little words (word suggestions are on the download),

then tries to figure out what word he can spell when he uses all the letters. He got it!

Day 4: Word Hunt

We read through the text and each time he found an ar word, he circled it with his dry erase marker. He even found a couple of oddball words. A list of AR words is on page 1 of the reader.

Day 5: Blind Sort

To see a blind sort in action, see Lesson 1 under Short a (#5 in that post.)

SIGHT WORDS: (You can find a list of sight words for the lesson on the very first page of the God Heard Their Cries Reader and word cards in the Word-Wac-Woe activity.)

I pulled out three new words for him this week: were, their and saw. My suggestion is you also pull 2-5 new words out for your own child; but the majority of the words should already be familiar to him.

Sight Word Hunt

To integrate his new sight words into our reading, I had him go through and circle them each time he saw them in the reader.

Then he kept tally to see which of his three new words was in his reader the most.

Secret Sentence: Unscramble the sight words to find the secret sentence: God hears my cry. (I have the first letter of the secret sentence circled. This is to cue the child that this should be a capital letter.)

Roll & Write a Sentence: Roll 2 dice, add the sum, then use the number code to fill in the sentence. (2 pages in download)

Word-Wac-Woe: (strategy resembles Tic-Tac-Toe)

If you’ve already printed off words from Lessons 1-6, you only need to print off pages 13-15 of the download for Lesson 7’s words.

Display and read through 15-20 of the sight word cards, jot them down on your game board, shuffle the cards and place them face-down in a pile.

Players take turns reading the sight words and crossing them off their game boards. We usually play that whoever crosses off their entire game board wins–this makes the game last longer and more words are read. Further directions are in the download.