If you want your students to have fun with phonics, Rhyme Time is an excellent activity! It’s cheerful, it’s rhythmic, and it gets everyone involved. Best of all, your young learners slowly pick up skills like deletion and substitution without even knowing it! Rhyming exercises help students develop phonemic awareness, which is the foundation for all reading, writing, and spelling.
To start this activity and have fun with phonics, gather your students around. Let them know it’s Rhyme Time!
Have Fun With Phonics With Rhyme Time
Rhyme Time makes it easy to have fun with phonics. This short exercise gets kids pumped up to learn more about sounds and words. It is a great way to start or end larger lessons when kids need a bit of energizing. For this activity, you will need:
- Rhyming Cards
- Pocket Chart
If you are already using Professor Pup’s Phoneme Farm, just log into your Teacher Portal. You’ll find the 24 rhyming cards under “Supplemental Materials” and can print them out. If you don’t use access to our ready-made rhyming cards, you can create your own using Index cards!
You may already have a pocket chart in your classroom. This is a chart lined with several clear pockets to hold cards. If you do not want to use a pocket chart, feel free to use any other method you prefer to display cards for the children to see.
Introduce
Once your students are gathered around, explain to them that they will be learning how to rhyme, and that rhyming words share ending sounds.
Play!
1. Take a pair of rhyming cards—such as ram and jam—and place them next to each other in the pocket chart.
2. Identify the images on the rhyming cards so that each child understands what they are.
3. Create a rhyming chant for your students to hear. You might say, “Jam, ram, jam, ram…am, am, am!” Speak clearly and loudly so that your students really hear the phonemes in those words and find the similarities. Repeat the chant and invite your students to follow along.
4. Once you have cleared one pair of rhyming words, select the next pair of rhyming words and repeat the song. Soon enough, your students will start to recognize the pattern and the similar sounds in these words. However, be sure that you’re always in the lead. Point out patterns, enunciate clearly and set an example for the children to follow.
This game helps develop young learners’ phonemic awareness while having fun with phonics activities!
Join Professor Pup and His Friends To Have Fun With Phonics
At Professor Pup’s Academy, we want everyone to have fun with phonics. It’s the easiest way to learn! That’s why we put so much thought into designing and developing our programs. With Professor Pup, your students have the company of friendly characters, energizing songs and engaging activities to learn how to read while having fun with phonics.
If you don’t already use Professor Pup in your classroom, check us out! In addition, incorporate activities like Rhyme Time to ensure that your students have fun with phonics while learning everything they need to become successful readers, writers and spellers.