| |
A Rhyme in Time
We
have received a number of questions from parents about their child's
inability to rhyme. In response to these concerns, we are posting the
following email and reply. (Please see
FAQ
for additional emails).
I was
watching (a certain talk show) about children with learning disabilities,
and the guest author diagnosed a student as disabled because he could not
rhyme
I asked my son to name a word that rhymed with cat. He replied,
car.
Should I be concerned that he cannot rhyme?
Rhyming is one
of the last auditory discrimination skills (the ability to differentiate
between and among letter sounds) that an emergent reader develops. In
fact, rhyming is not an ability that is automatically acquired it is a
skill that must be taught. If your son cannot rhyme, it may be because no
one ever explained to him what the word rhyme means.
Webster defines
rhyme as a similarity of sounds of two or more words, esp. at the end of
lines of poetry. Given that loose definition, your son was right cat
and car do have similar sounds. To better clarify the term, you may want
to explain to your son that it is the final or
ENDING sounds of each word that must be the same. cAT, hAT, bAT,
sAT
gO, tOe, hOe, knOw. (see below for a supplemental list of rhyming
words.)
The Phonemic Awareness Process: Phonemic
awareness is a childs basic understanding that speech is composed of a
series of individual sounds. The process goes something like this:
First, the child
learns to recognize the initial sound the sound of the first letter in a
word.
Next, he will recognize the final or ending sound in a word.
Sometime during
this process, he will begin to recognize the medial or middle sound.
An example of this process using the word cat would be as follows:
first: /k/ which is the sound of the letter c; second: /t/ which is the
sound of t; third: /a/ which is the short vowel sound of the letter a.
Lastly, he will begin to recognize the sounds of letter combinations:
such as in the word chirp beginning /ch/ and ending /rp/.
If your son is
doing well in other areas and just cannot grasp the concept of rhyming,
give him some time. Rhyming is one of those
developmental tasks that a child acquires when he is ready. In the
meantime, tell him that he is a number one son!
_______________________
In addition to reciting nursery rhymes, you may want to ask your local
librarian for books with rhyming text. When playing your own rhyming games
with your child, you may find the following list helpful:
-
bat, cat, rat,
sat, fat, splat
-
day, play, say,
way, clay
-
king, sing,
fling, thing, wing
-
chop, drop, hop,
shop
-
gate, plate,
late
-
cake, shake,
flake, take, make, awake
-
ice, mice, nice,
rice
-
drip, ship, lip,
slip, trip, snip
-
can, man, pan,
tan
-
fill, hill,
will, till, quill
-
cap, map, flap,
tap, gap, lap, nap, rap
|
|