Whether your child prefers singing The Itsy Bitsy Spider or the latest release from One Direction, this rhyming activity is an easy way to tune up phonemic awareness and make reading and spelling easier.
1. Sing or listen to a song that has several rhyming words. I thought about this when I was singing This Old Man with my five year old the other day.
2. Identify some rhyming words in the song and write them down.
3. Take a look at the word pairs. What do you notice? Do the words look kind of the same? (They don’t always.) Notice what letter combinations make the rhyming sounds.
spout/out: Both end in “out”
true/do: Same sound, different spelling
back/fact: Those words don’t rhyme but they have some sounds in common. (This happens a lot of times in songs, and it’s something that can be confusing to new rhymers, so it’s worth noticing and discussing.)
4. If your song contains word pairs with different spelling patterns, you could write the spelling patterns down on separate sticky notes or scraps of paper. (ay/eigh, ue/ew, etc.) Then sing the song and try holding up the correct spelling pattern as you sing the word.
5. Brainstorm more words that rhyme, talk about how they’re spelled and make up your own new song using some of your rhyming words!
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