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Help Your Child Learn to Read: Phonological Awareness Games for Preschoolers- Rhyming

By Kayla Bates Santoro | October 13, 2023

In my previous blog post, Phonological Awareness Skills All Kids Need to Learn, I walked you guys through what Phonological Awareness is, why these skills are vitally important to the development of reading in children, and the five areas of Phonological Awareness that are vital to reading success. As a refresher, these skills include Rhyming, Segmentation, Blending, Isolation, Deletion, and Substitution. In today’s blog post, we will dive a little deeper into specific games/materials you can utilize at home to aid in your child’s development of Rhyming. My hope is that you can take these activities and incorporate them into your daily routine at home in a fun and exciting way!

Rhyming: When working on rhyming skills with your child, you will want to target both identifying and producing rhyming words. A great way to target rhyming is utilizing what are called “word families”. For example, the “-an” word family includes the following words: ran, man, fan, van, pan, ban, can, tan, Dan, Jan. An amazing product we frequently use in our office for rhyming is the “What’s the Rhyme Sorting Houses”. In this game, each house has a different word family (i.e. “-at”, “-ug”, “-ing”, etc), and you can sort all of the rhyming words into the houses as you play. There are also a variety of free word family/rhyming worksheets online, where you can play matching and sorting games, in order to strengthen your child’s ability to identify and match the rhyming words (i.e. “Do mat and mug rhyme?”, “Do rock and lock rhyme?). Another great way to introduce the concept of rhyming words is through book reading. Reading books to your child and pointing out the rhyming words/having them fill them in after a few reads, is a fun and easy way to target this skill when you are short on time!

Once your child is consistently able to identify and match rhyming words, next you can move on to producing rhyming words. For rhyme production, you can use some of the same games as above to work on producing their own rhyming words. Instead of using the houses as a sorting game to identify if the words rhyme, take a house and have them come up with the rhyming words for each house (either with the use of visual pictures or without, depending on their level). You can also utilize other games, such as rhyming puzzles, to target this skill too. Rhyming puzzles are great to use for rhyme production, because they often only work with the correct “rhyming word” and not the other words in the box. There are also a plethora of other rhyming activities (free and paid) online at your disposal (websites I frequently use are Teachers Pay Teachers, Boom Learning, and The Reading Mama).

Below are just a few rhyming activities that you can utilize at home. Some are free and others are available for purchase online:

What’s the Rhyme Sorting Houses:

Word Families/Rhyming Worksheets (free downloads):

Rhyming Puzzles:

Rhyming Puzzle (free download): https://www.123homeschool4me.com/rhyming-words-activity/

Rhyming Books:

  • McNosh Hangs Up Her Wash
  • Green Eggs and Ham
  • Goodnight Moon
  • Chicka Chicka Boom Boom
  • The Fleas Sneeze
  • A Frog in the Bog

 

I sincerely hope that this blog post, Help Your Child Learn to Read: Phonological Awareness Games for Preschoolers-Rhyming, is a resource that you can come back to again and again as your child’s development continues! Stay tuned in future months for follow up blog posts (from me), which will continue to provide even more Phonological Awareness Games in the remaining areas: Segmenting/Blending, Isolation and Deletion/Substitution.

Posted in PediaSpeech, phonological awareness activity, rhyming, Speech Therapy and tagged , ,