Activity Objective

The goal of Teaching Rhyme Through Songs: Foundations for Phonemic Awareness is to use rhyming couplets in familiar songs to build an awareness of rhyme.

What You Need

Prep Time:

2 minutes
- Choose a familiar rhyming song

Task Time:

5 minutes
- Class sings a rhyming song
- Class identifies the rhyming words in the song
- Class thinks of other rhyming words

Materials Required:

What You Do

Teacher Role:

Facilitator:
- throughout activity

Student Grouping:

Whole class:
- throughout activity

Assessment Ideas:

- Make anecdotal notes about students' ability to identify rhymes

- Assess students individually by providing them with a one-syllable word and seeing if they can create a rhyme

Quick Tips

Activity Extensions:

- Sing other songs and identify the rhyming word pairs

- Have student work in pairs to generate rhyming words

- Have students explicitly identify the rhyme in each one-syllable rhyming word, for example: "stout", "spout", they both say "out!" (See below for more details)

Additional Comments:

- You may wish to make your explanation of "rhyme" more explicit. One-syllable words rhyme when they sound the same from the vowel to the end of the word. So "make" and "cake" rhyme because they both say "ake", "shirt," and "hurt" rhyme because they both say "urt." The part of the word that goes from the vowel until the end of the syllable is called a rhyme.

- In general, words rhyme when they sound the same from the final stressed vowel until the end of the word. So "paper" and "caper" rhyme, because the final stressed vowel is the long-a sound, but "paper" and "maker" do not rhyme. "Complication" and "consternation" rhyme because they both sound the same from the final stressed vowel sound until the end ("ation").