Teaching rhyming words to kindergarten students is essential. This is because rhyming is a foundational phonological awareness skill that supports reading.
Maybe you’re a homeschool mom determined to teach your child to read. On the other hand, perhaps you’re a classroom teacher and need to teach small groups of children. Here are 15 ways to teach rhyming in kindergarten and beyond.
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15 Ways to Teach Rhyming to Kindergarten
A great way to introduce rhyming to kids in kindergarten (or when developmentally ready) is to use rhyming games. Using games is an effective and fun way to increase attention span and overall learning.
When we increase fun, the parts of your child’s brain responsible for learning will be open for business. Here are 15 ways to teach rhyming to kindergarten and any child who needs to learn.
1. Rhyme Aloud
The first and more obvious rhyming activity is to simply model some rhyming words to your student. It’s a good idea to have some word family charts or flashcards on hand.
Start with simple CVC words. For example, the “-at” word family.
- at
- sat
- bat
- hat
- rat
- cat
- lat
- zat
- wat
- yat
Notice that I added some nonsense words to the list. When teaching rhyming words to children, creating new rhyming words or words with no meaning is a great way to be silly. Additionally, it’s a great way to hone in on your child’s phonemic awareness skills.
Simply go back and forth trying to find words that rhyme. In the beginning, you may need to model this by simply saying the words aloud to your child. Once they hear the pattern, give them a chance to make words rhyme with yours. Take turns.
2. Chanting Words
Chanting words to any rhythm increases engagement and retention.
If you’re teaching a group of children, have them sit in a circle on the floor with you at the center.
On the other hand, if you’re homeschooling, sit across from one another on the floor, on bean bags, or wherever you’re most comfortable.
Choose an ending sound to work with. Again let’s use “-at” words.
- Start by alternating tapping your hands on top of your legs and clapping to a beat
- Spend the time needed to help your child get the beat (this is an important skill in and of itself)
- Once you and your child are in rhythm, begin by saying the first word in your “-at” word list
- “Cat” (tap)
- “Cat” (tap), “Sat” (tap)
- “Cat” (tap), “Sat” (tap), “Rat” (tap)
- Alternate back and forth saying rhyming words
When you get to a stopping point, the next step is to encourage your child to create nonsense rhyme words.
3. Create Nonsense Words
Rhyming words don’t have to be real words. A good way to strengthen your child’s oral language skills is by creating nonsense words. Nonsense words are simply made-up words. You can play with words in different ways to do this.
Create a few word family cards. For example, grab a few index cards and write one of the following per card.
- “-ig”
- “-an”
- “im”
- -“it”
Hold up one card and have your child create a nonsense rhyming word using a different beginning sound. If your child is a visual learner, grab a whiteboard and make a list of beginning sounds to choose from.
4. Use Children’s Names
Kids love to hear the sound of their names. Especially when they’re having fun.
Go around the dinner table making up rhymes to your child’s name. Take turns creating name rhymes by adding beginning sounds to the ending sounds of the names of:
- family,
- friends,
- pets
You can even use your child’s favorite video game or TV characters. Pair learning with interest.
5. Drive Time Rhymes
One of the best ways to use this simple teaching strategy is to make a game of it while driving in the car. For example,
Let’s see how many “-at” words we can come up with while the light is red. Ready? Set. Go!
The goal is to use car time to work on rhyming skills without acting like your child’s “learning”. Make learning a natural part of your family culture.
Which Words Don’t Rhyme?
Another rhyming skill is the ability to discriminate which words don’t rhyme in a set of words.
Offer your child three words:
- cat, rat, hot
Ask them to identify which word does NOT match the rhyme. Modify the complexity of the game by:
- increasing the number of words to choose from.
- change the word family ending sound
- use multi-syllable words
Better yet, have your child test you. This is yet another higher-level form of learning.
6. Nursery Rhymes
Don’t ever underestimate the power of Mother Goose’s nursery rhymes. While they’re wonderful for the early years of preschool, they’re incredible tools to add to your prereading lesson plan.
- Hickory Dickory Dock
- Jack and Jill
- Little Miss Muffet
- Pat-A-Cake
- Humpty Dumpty
Read nursery rhymes aloud to your children. Have them follow along with you. If you’re homeschooling, add one nursery rhyme to your morning binder each week.
Memorize & Recite
Simply type up a nursery rhyme in large font, print it, and add it to your child’s morning binder.
- Practice chanting or singing the nursery rhyme every day.
- Have your child highlight the rhyming words at the end of each line.
- See if you can motivate your child to memorize the poem and share it with the family on Friday night.
Need some more ideas for your morning binder? Here are some worksheets to add.
- Calendar
- Learning My World: Address, Phone Number, and More Geography Unit
- Simple History timeline
- Scripture memory plan
Fun Fact: Did you know that classic nursery rhymes were originally written as a way to mock the rich? Yep. These clever rhymes were meant as adult entertainment in the 16th-18th centuries.
7. Rhyming Songs on Youtube
Another simple way to incorporate rhyming is to sing rhyming songs with your young learners. To make it multisensory, turn on any one of these videos to guide your rhyme time.
- Make a Rhyme, Make a Move
- Jack Hartmann’s clever and catchy rhyming song. In this song, however, he focuses only on correctly identifying rhyming pairs.
- Kids use hand motions to indicate whether or not a word pair rhymes.
- Make a Rhyme, Make a Move is a good song to start with because it requires kids only to hear the sounds rather than come up with their own rhymes.
- “I Love to Rhyme”
- This is another song by Jack Hartmann and it’s full of rhyming pairs such as met/pet, ham/sam, tot/got
- He chants the rhyming pairs and then leaves a blank line for a missing word. That gives kids the opportunity to come up with their own rhymes.
- For example, the song lyrics include, “Met, Pet, ____” (Child may say the word “Set”)
Videos are an excellent way to engage distracted learners. This is because they can dance, move, and wiggle, and they think they’re getting away with “screen time.”
8. Lullabies and Poems
Any parent can support their child’s sound recognition skills by singing rhyming lullabies each night. The classic Twinkle Twinkle Litle Star is the perfect example. Another great option is to enjoy short poems together.
- I See the Moon
- Baa Baa Black Sheep
Make wordplay a fun activity by simply sprinkling rhyming poems throughout the day.
9. Read Rhyming Books
There’s nothing better than reading picture books with our kids. To teach rhyming to your students, grab a rhyming book and have fun. Read rhyming books to your child in an interactive way.
Start with shorter rhyming books such as Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown. Another option is Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin
- Spend time looking at the ending sounds of the last words in each line.
- Have your child use magnetic letters to create the rhyming words that you’ve identified.
- Show them how to rhyme words by changing out the beginning letters
There are so many word activities that you can use to improve your child’s rhyming skills. If your child needs more letter practice, give these Letter Tracing Worksheets a try.
10. Have a Dr. Seuss Week
Rhyming books are fun and plentiful. In fact, there’s no shortage of rhyming books in the Dr. Seuss collection. Pull them all out and have a Dr. Seuss week!
I recommend starting with Hop on Pop as it’s filled with CVC words. Then enjoy some of the others.
- The Cat in the Hat
- Green Eggs and Ham
- A Fly Went By (my personal favorite)
When your child is familiar with rhyming, change up your reading style just a bit. Try using this Dr Seuss hat template for more fun.
11. Rhyming Cliff-Hangers
As you read aloud, leave out the last rhyming word and make it a cliff-hanger. You want to create such tension that your child can’t help but fill in the silence with the correct rhyme.
For example, in Green Eggs and Ham
- “That Sam-I-Am. I do not like green eggs and… ______”
Your student or students won’t be able to resist shouting the word “HAM!” In the end, if you did nothing more than read Dr. Seuss’s books and traditional nursery rhymes, you’d cover the first stage of rhyme recognition.
12. Movement Rhymes
Another simple and fun way to make learning to rhyme a multi-sensory experience is to add movement. Choose a pair of rhyming words such as “snap” and “rap.” Come up with motions to go with each word pair.
As you say each word, do the motions. Incorporating different body parts into the wordplay makes it so much fun for the kids. Further, engagement and attention will increase which, again, will increase learning.
Check out this movement activity for kids as another source of inspiration.
Importance of Rhyme in Older Students
When it comes to older struggling students, it’s important to get something straight. Despite what you may have heard, every resistant reader needs to know how to rhyme.
I can’t tell you how often moms come to me worried about their older student’s resistance to or challenges with reading.
My first question is always, “Can they rhyme?”
Nine times out of ten, once they ask their child to rhyme, Mom realizes that her older child cannot do it. In the end, if your older child struggles with reading, go back to the basics.
13. Collect Rhymes as a Game
One fun way to increase engagement and increase mastery is to collect rhyming words.
Create a fun rhyming word recording sheet and either place it in your child’s morning binder or somewhere else where it’s accessible.
Work together to add rhyming words or phrases to your rhyming recording sheet. Make a game of it and try to come up with a certain number of rhymes. This is a great way to foster independent work as your child adds their rhymes to the shared rhyme collection.
14. Rhyming Puzzles
While direct instruction has its place, there are times when kids need to take the reigns. Rhyming Fun-to-Know Puzzles are a great way to encourage independent practice.
Further, manipulating puzzle pieces is a great way for kindergarteners or any younger learners to develop fine motor skills.
15. Rhyming Splat
Rhyming Splat is a great game to add to your teaching toolbox.
In this teacher-created game, each player gets six different word cards. The caller calls out a rhyming word, and players scan their cards to identify a rhyming match.
This game is great because it allows kids independent practice at identifying rhymes. Even if they can’t read yet, they can match the word endings. I think this would be a great addition to any first-grade language arts curriculum.
Children’s Development of Language
Children develop language layer by layer, hour by hour, day by day, over time. More specifically, young children develop language through hearing and eventually, practicing language aloud.
- Hearing
- Hearing their mother’s voice and their voice as they cry, for example.
- Orally
- Through crying, babbling, and cooing.
- And eventually by practicing saying different sounds and new words.
As you can see, hearing and speaking are foundational components of language development. Somewhere around kindergarten, children are generally ready to work on the next area of language acquisition. Phonological awareness.
Phonological Awareness
What is phonological awareness and why does it matter?
Phonological awareness overarching ability to isolate and manipulate the separate parts of spoken words. Skills related to phonological awareness include some of the following.
- Ability to rhyme,
- Recognize alliteration,
- Break words into syllables,
- Identify how many words are in a spoken sentence
Phonological Awareness in Your Life
Think about the first time you heard someone speak in a foreign language. It’s likely that you heard a string of sounds, but were unable to identify them.
You likely had no idea how many words were spoken. Let alone understand what the person was trying to communicate. In the end, you simply heard a jumble of sounds.
Eventually, if you desire, you may choose to learn that second language or not. The point is that this is exactly what children experience as they develop language skills.
FREE CVC Rhyming Word Printable
Teaching Tip: Jumbles of Sounds
Just because a child is using words does not mean that they know how many words are in a spoken sentence. This is a phonological awareness skill like any other that, eventually, will develop over time.
However, in our effort to keep kids “on grade level”, it’s not uncommon for crucial phonological awareness skills to be skipped. Fortunately, you know better and want to give your child a solid foundation for reading.
Phonemic Awareness Skills
Another important component of language acquisition is developing phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness skills are related to a child’s ability to identify and manipulate individual sounds to make words.
For example, when they hear the word “cat.”
They’re able to identify the separate sound units or phonemes that make up the word. Specifically, your child hears “cat” and knows the word is made up of three individual sounds:
- /c/
- /a/
- /t/
At that point you know they’ve developed a basic level of phonemic awareness. This is a crucial skill that many struggling students need to revisit to progress in reading.
So, now that we understand the basics, let’s turn our attention to rhyming. Even more, let’s figure out how to help your child develop this skill in a fun way.
What is Rhyming… Really?
Ok. To get us on the same page, let’s clarify our terms. What exactly is rhyming?
Rhyming words are words that have the same ending sounds. Notice that I didn’t say “have the same ending spelling.”
Rhyming words don’t have to look the same (don’t have to be spelled the same). They just need to sound the same. This is where the Greek roots of the term PHONOLOGICAL help.
- Phon- prefix that means “sound”
- Logos- means “word”
Phonological refers to the sounds that words make. Phonological awareness is an auditory skill. Hence, reading is first and foremost an auditory skill. Don’t skip phonological awareness development.
An Important Skill for Older Struggling Readers
This is important if you’ve got an older child or teen who resists or struggles with reading. Don’t assume they can rhyme.
The rhyming teaching strategies presented today are targeted at kindergarten and lower grade levels. Keep in mind, however, that each strategy can be modified to meet the needs of any struggling reader regardless of age.
Rhyming Words Can Look Different
Please note that while rhyming words DO NOT have to look the same, they often do. Specifically, when we refer to word families such as “-ain” words.
- Brain
- Rain
- Stain
- Strain
These all sound and look the same. However, take a look at these words:
- Rain
- Cane
While they don’t have the exact same visual endings, they both have the same ending sounds.
Three Steps to Rhyming
In the end, rhyming is an important concept in children’s development and typically evolves in a 3-step process.
- Hearing (Exposure)
- Recognizing
- Speaking (Producing)
As you read through the different ways to teach rhyming, you’ll notice these 3-steps are addressed throughout. Let’s get rhyming!
Recap: Teaching Rhyming to Kindergarten
When all is said and done, mastering the English language requires lots of time. Specifically, lots of practice hearing and speaking.
Once kids hit the elementary school developmental level, it’s important to sharpen their phonological awareness skills.
Whether your child is in kindergarten or first grade, or is an older struggling student, rhyming skills are essential.
To recap, you can teach rhyming using a number of different activities.
- simple games,
- reading rhyming books,
- engaging in wordplay
Further, increase motivation by using students’ names and their interests.
So, Friend. What do you think? Have any other rhyming activities to share?
In this together!
FREE CVC Rhyming Word Printable
