RHYMING PAIRS BASKET LITERACY GAME April 9, 2014 by Anna Ranson 922Pin 0Share Tweet 0Share
Make a simple rhyming activity to help practise rhyming pairs and learn about literacy in a playful, hands-on way!
We have been practising hearing and identifying rhyming words together recently and focused initially on identifying rhyming strings with word families that all have the same middle and end sounds. For example, making a collection of rhyming words that all belong in the “-at” family, such as “cat”, “mat”, “bat”, “sat”, “fat” etc.
To make learning more concrete and playful, we always like to make the activity using manipulatives and as playful as possible. We all learn best while touching, moving and doing, rather than looking at a worksheet or set of 2D images!
As a next step activity to making the rhyming strings, we had fun playing with real objects that sounded the same but didn’t necessarily all have the same spelling patterns. For example, “bear and chair” which sound the same but are not spelt the same. This was an entirely auditory activity, placing emphasis on listening, discriminating and matching sounds, rather than writing them down or reading them, so it still comes as an early step in the process in understanding about rhyme. I put together a very simple and easy activity using a large basket and some small toys from various Playmobil, Sylvanian Families and other small sets. I made simple pairs of rhyming objects and then mixed them all up to be found and matched.
In the basket where
A goat and a boat
dog and frog
man and fan chair and bear snake and cake cat and hat duck and truck fox and box mouse and house car and star
The game was simply to pick one object, say its name out loud, then to look through the basket for another object which rhymed with it. In some cases we needed to name at the objects first and say them clearly to emphasise the main sounds. Then they placed the rhyming objects into pairs and we jumped along the line, saying them together again. “A fox and a box, a man and a fan, a dog and a frog!” etc
Your child might want to add more objects to rhyme with those already in the box, have a look around the house for some more to put in. They won't find it easy at first, which means you can play this again until they are more familiar with the idea. What they are learning as they play: literacy: identifying rhyming strings, matching words by sound, discriminating sounds