Aside from teaching students that have IEP’s, I also teach phonological awareness as early intervention program to non IEP kids. I teach this in kindergarten to Grade 2. It’s supposed to be fun and it IS fun, however, when I began teaching the kindergarten, I was so surprised that 2 of the kids didn’t “get” the rhyming words. How hard can it be? I read somewhere that rhyming doesn’t really have anything to do with reading. Should I even bother reteaching rhyming words again to the 5 year old or can I proceed to the next level which is blending? How does one re teach rhyming words??? I though it would be easy.
Re: phonological awareness
The inability to rhyme suggests that these students are not processing sounds normally. My son was like that in K. Couldn’t rhyme for the life of him. He has a Central Auditory Processing Disorder (CAPD). After lots of intervention, rhyming is not an issue.
I would keep an eye on those kids for other problems.
Beth
There is a connection.
There is a pretty strong connection between the ability to rhyme and do other things with manipulating sounds and the ability to learn to read. Was it/Is it easy for you? If so, reading is more likely to have come easily to you.
You could do a HUGE favor for your students (the life-changing kind) if you will recognize that a: this ability to move sounds around really *is* important enough to *teach* (as opposed to doing it some, every once in a while, because it’s supposed to be good for them and you can say you did it to parents who know enough about reading to ask you — but the fact that you’ve figured out that thekids are struggling with it says that you do care whether they learn it or not) and b: that it’s not something that necessarily comes easily — having nothing at all to do with other abilities to do well in school. (I think of it as being like musical talent — there are very bright folks who are tone deaf, right? And folks with a great ear for music… and everybody can learn a *lot* with good teaching.)
If you’ve read that rhyming doesn’t have anything to do with reading, then it sounds like you’ve been reading defenses of whole language — and the ones that aren’t even good enough to bother with remotely resembling the truth. (There is a lot in valid defense of whole language — but there’s a lot of the other kind too.) In general, These kiddos with the rhyming problems simply need lots more structure and systematic teaching of the sounds and then the letters that go with them than whole language provides. If they’re bright they can fake it — and then I’m working with them in the remedial high school and college courses. If you’ve gotten this far with this post, wander over to the “Reading” section of LD InDepth and check out some of the articles like “Catch them before they fall.”
Re: phonological awareness
Some children need to learn to walk before they can run — in fact, I’d say most of them do. What you’re describing is similar to asking a child to identify the first sound in a word before he knows the meaning of “first” and “sound”. The same applies to “ending sounds” and “rhyming”. A child needs to know ending sounds and combinations of sounds that make “sound families” before they can make comparisons. Some children seemingly discover this innately and others need lots of instruction before they understand rhyming.
I’d make the first step orally segmenting words into sounds and teaching them the letters that represent those sounds, i.e., \a\ -\m. Once they learn that the combination makes a word family — dam, ham, jam, ram, Sam, tam — you can teach them the meaning of rhyme which is essentially sounds of the vowel and other sounds that follow it. When one gets to long vowel sounds, spellings will vary — ail, ale, pail, pail, sail, sale, wail, whale, etc., — but the sounds are consistent; therefore they rhyme.
My personal opinion is that a lot of phonemic awareness training is putting the cart before the horse. My feeling is that simply teaching sound segmentation and encoding the sounds is the easiest way to achieve it. Grace at
Re: phonological awareness
The inability to rhyme indicates that the child has poor phonemic awareness, and research done by Dr. G. Reid Lyon and the National Institues of Child Health and Human Development shows that good phonemic awareness is the foundation for learning to read. A child with poor phonemic awareness will have great difficulty learning to read with phonics or whole language. A good program (endorsed by Dr. Jospeh K. Torgesen, one of the reseachers who worked with Dr. Lyon) is “Phonemic Awareness in Young Children: A Classroom Curriculum” by Marilyn Jager Adams, et al. from Brookes Publishinng 1-800-638-3775.
This book also explains the nature and importance of phonemic awareness and provides references to research articles supporting the importance of this ability.
Dear Barbara,
As a parent of a child that didn’t “get” rhyming words until well into the third grade and still cannot rhyme all words, I can tell you that it can be extremely hard. When a childs brain does not process information the way the majority of other peoples brains process information, it takes time and a variety of methods to teach that skill.
I challenge you to think carefully about your question, “How hard can it be?”. Think about a subject or a task that you have tried over and over and cannot master. I’m sure many other people in the world have mastered the task. How hard can it be for you to master the task? Why can’t you get it? It is because your brain or body cannot process it yet and you need a variety of different methods to help you along until you can accomplish the task.
I’m not writing this to say that you are a bad teacher for thinking this way. Many people do think this way about tasks that come easy to them but not easy to others. I’m just hoping that you will think about what the question really means. It may change the way you look at all children and the learning process or all children. All children learn differently.
Sincerely,
D