What is a Pirate’s favourite shop?

Arrrgos

What is a Pirate’s favourite animal?

An aarrrdvarrrk

What does a Pirate spread on his toast?

Marrrmite or marrrmalade.

We have had hours of fun with the endless possibilities of pirate jokes around the dinner table.  My youngest daughter’s recent addition is

What is a Pirate’s favourite fruit?

An arrrringe.

Pirate jokes are a great way to practice oral phonics and rhyme.

My middle daughter is beginning to learn to read and write so I decided to use International Talk Like a Pirate day to introduce the ‘ar’ sound.

What Sound does a Pirate make?

arrrrrr

What sound does the letter ‘r’ make?

rrr like rrrabbit and rrred.

So even though it is called an ‘r’ it doesn’t make an ‘ar’ sound. We need more than just a letter ‘r’ to make a pirate sound.  We make a pirate sound with a and r together.

I gave her a magnetic ‘a’ and ‘r’ on a board along with a number of consonants. We used the magnetic letters to make as many word with ‘ar’ in them as we could exaggerating the ‘arrrrr’ sound in a pirate voice.

My daughter moved letters around to make different words and blended the sounds to read them out.

I wrote down the words for her in a list

jar

mars

bar

star

tar

car

Martha

arm

art

far

farm

Martin

She then dictated a story using the words and I underlined the ‘ar’ words for her to read .

Once upon a time there was a pirate called Martin.  He loved to eat a jar of pickles. He also loved to go to the scarecrow farm which was far away. He also like to do art. He had a pet wolf called Martha. One night there were lots of stars. He went out in the car to see his cheeky friend.  He always called his girlfriends funny names. Martin threw a bottle of tar on his friend’s arm. So he ate a Mars Bar.

As we read the story we said all the ‘ar’ words in a pirate voice.

As we were walking around the museum at the weekend she said

Mummy, I’ve thought of another pirate word ‘guitarrrr’

I wonder how many more she will come up with.