Using Rhyming to Promote Phonemic Awareness in Elementary School

Phonemic awareness is a crucial component of any reader’s tool kit. It’s crucial in chunking and blending words, as well as building vocabulary. As it involves the ability to listen to and manipulate phonemes, the skill also bridges reading and writing. Playing with rhyme is a fun way to develop this skill, and it’s a common component of teaching in the younger grades.

Over the last 15 years of my career, I’ve witnessed a decline in the use of nursery rhymes, poetry, and verbal language play. Perhaps this is why my recent cohorts of students are now far less familiar with rhyming and a bit hesitant about it. However, as soon as they get comfortable using rhyming, students have so much fun.

Buddy Programs Can Support Phonemic Awareess

As is the case in many schools, our school has a buddy system where grades team up to give mixed-age learning experiences. My buddy class is a grade one class, and around Halloween it was time to create a meaningful learning experience for both my grade three and the grade one buddies.

Knowing how important phonemic awareness is, I created a mini-poetry unit based around rhyming and generating adjectives. Since it was Halloween, I picked a monster theme and matched it to a rhyming picture book called The Ravenous Beast.

This is a picture book from the United Kingdom, and I used it many years ago when I started out my career as a grade one teacher, so I felt confident that it would work. In the book, a monster boasts that he can eat lists of things. Other animals try to out-eat him, only to get eaten in the end. The grade one teacher and I paired the students and challenged them to create their own Ravenous Beast—a challenge they gobbled up with enthusiasm. 

Teaching Phonemic Awareness in Action

This mini-poetry unit utilized a wide range of literacy skills, which included listening and speaking, collaboration, and writing. The teaching process breaks down into six parts.

1. What is rhyming? I began with discussing this concept, looking at how rhyme is the paired or repeated end sound of words. To articulate this skill, we played a game called I Say/You Say that I created in which I said a random noun and then gave the students three seconds to call out a word that rhymed with it. I pre-taught this game to my grade three students so they could help lead their buddies, but the younger students grasped the concept quickly.

2. Select a book to read. I believe that all good language-rich units should feature a text, so I read a copy of The Ravenous Beast, drawing attention to the rhyming words in the text.

3. Model writing using a graphic organizer. I showed the students how to use a graphic organizer that I designed for the Ravenous Beast book. First, I generated pairs of rhyming nouns, and then I included adjectives. I asked the students to suggest adjectives (the grade three students led this part). These were my examples:

A redwood tree and a creaky knee.

A haunted school and a rusty tool.

A slimy frog and a snarling dog.

A lonely leaf and dirty teeth.

A wild robot and a steaming pot.

4. Include other language skills. In order to produce their own rhyming pairs, the students needed to understand what a noun was. So, we observed physical objects in the room, which also assisted with vocabulary development. In addition, some of the grade three students could identify the use of alliteration in the text: repetition of beginning phonemes in strings of words. This was a useful additional phonemic awareness skill that I was able to introduce into my model sentences, which provided extension for my most confident writers.

5. Encourage writing and talking. The key to the writing was how each partnership had to have the same rhyming words, which meant discussing and deciding first. My older students were able to support and encourage their buddies, some of whom were emerging writers, so the volume of writing varied. We came back together for a second lesson, where the bulk of writing was achieved. Throughout both lessons I placed rhyming couplets on an anchor chart, as some partnerships found it challenging to generate rhymes.

6. Ask students to come up with awesome adjectives. A lot of enjoyment was shared with generating describing words for each rhyming noun couplet. I reminded the students that toilet-humor words were not acceptable, but the adjectives could be serious or silly, as long as they were relevant to the noun. Again, the older students were expected to be role models and leaders in this language area.

Sharing Builds Awareness

The writing part was finished halfway through the second lesson, so we moved on to recital. The goal here was for each partnership to share three of their favorite couplets. Every partnership had generated at least three, and most did more. I modeled how to read aloud using tone, an appropriate pace, and my voice to add emphasis. I also invited the buddies to share at the front of the class, something almost all of them chose to do. They had about 15 minutes to rehearse their recital. I would normally give more, but its being a buddy lesson, I needed to be conscious of time limitations.

This part of the process helped build every student’s confidence with presentation and spoken language, and the audience members were able to hear the rhymes and further build their phonemic awareness.

Art Helps Bring the Beasts to Life

I added a final art lesson later that week in which my grade three students drew their Ravenous Beasts and then showed them to the class. If I had been able to take more time out of our packed schedules, I probably would have had all the buddies draw their beasts first, as visualizing is another great way to motivate language generation.

However, the students had a lot of fun generating rhyming couplets full of expressive adjectives that captured the grim, gory, and grotesque qualities of their beasts. This activity also reminded me how useful rhyme is for phonemic awareness and vocabulary building.