Rhyme Time!

Teaching rhyming has always been a struggle for me. In my experience, most reading programs do not systematically teach rhyming.  It's a skill that is lightly touched upon with poems and stories.  It is also assumed that students had a lot of experience with rhyming, whether in preschool or at home.

In the past, it was second nature for parents to sing rhymes, chants, and songs to their young children, even before their children spoke one word.  I have fond memories reading a special nursery rhyme book with my grandmother while sitting in her lap.  Many of my students come to me not knowing a single nursery rhyme.  There is a strong link between the nursery rhyme knowledge of Pre-K children and their future success in reading and spelling (MacLean, Bryant, and Bradley, 1987).

Rhymes teach children auditory discrimination, listening skills, a rich range of language, concentration skills, oral storytelling, to listen for and keep a steady beat, to learn whole songs and chants by heart at a very young age, and to retell stories/chants without using a book.

There are 5 Stages of Rhyming:

1. Rhyme Exposure: Mop and hop rhyme because they both end with /op/.

2. Rhyme Recognition: cat, sat. Do these words rhyme?

3. Rhyme Judgement: goat, boat, man. Which word does not rhyme?

4. Rhyme Completion: She wants to run and /pl/ /ay/, on this bright and sunny _____.

5. Rhyme Production: What is a word that rhymes with ball?

On my quest to learn more about teaching rhyming, I learned that a daily, consistent, systematic approach is the most effective.  Although I did find some instruction in our adopted ELA program, mainly in the Phonemic Awareness Intervention Teacher's Edition, I had to look for outside resources to find a daily explicit, structured program.

My class completed 10 weeks of a combination of the first five stages of rhyming, then we were ready for successful rhyme production.  Nursery Rhymes were included starting in week 9 as part of language awareness. We are currently on week 19.  Each rhyming lesson takes 2-3 minutes. If you would like to learn more about the program I used, go to www.heggerty.org.

I was curious in the data for my class and previous classes so I looked back at my ESGI data in the district rhyming assessments.  I saw my current students achievement in rhyming as 23% higher than in previous years.  As I gain more experience in teaching rhyming explicitly, I am confident that my students' scores will only increase.