The following resources are to guide teachers, students, and parents in becoming more phonemically aware by using rhyming activities and lessons.
1.
Resource: http://www.edb.utexas.edu/readstrong/rhyming.html
Phonemic awareness means understanding how sounds work and sound within words. Any person who has phonemic awareness can hear the individual sounds in words. It is an auditory skill, and is necessary for reading success. One of the most fundamental phonemic awareness skills is the ability to rhyme. When students learn how to rhyme, they are able make tons of associations and connections between words which then helps them to read.
The website, “Read Strong,” is a tool for parents and teachers to use with their students and children to teach phonemic awareness. Read Strong’s motto is, “Using research to help struggling readers become successful readers” (Read Strong Site). Read Strong’s website incorporates the participation of students, parents, and teachers to work together to help develop student’s phonemic awareness and eventually reading abilities. One specific section of the Read Strong website is their section on, “Rhyming Chants, Jingles and Songs” (Read String Site). The rhyming portion of the website provides fun and interactive lessons involving, “rhyming chants, jingles and songs,” to get students involved and familiarize them with rhyming (Read Strong Site). Yopp explains, “that phonemic awareness instruction for young children should be playful and engaging, interactive and social, and should stimulate curiosity and experimentation with language” (Yopp Article P. 132). Read Strong’s activities and instructions include just that. For example, Read Strong provides rhyming songs that students can use with jump ropes and hand clapping games. Through these activities, students are interacting with one another while they are learning to rhyme. The songs make the activities fun and engaging for the students so they will be encouraged to learn. These activities from Read Strong keep students active and learning. By incorporating songs with hand movements and/or jumping movements students will be able to pick out the rhyming words and understand there are patterns that go along with rhyming words and they will be able to make the connections as well. Students may also be encouraged to come up with their own rhymes and share them with the class. The Read Strong site includes lists of fantastic rhyming books, and other online resources parents and teachers can visit to further engage their students and children in rhyming activities.
Read Strong also provides a section for teachers to include how they themselves use and incorporate rhyming into their curriculum. This is a great way for teachers to communicate and share their ideas. Read Strong also provides a section like this for students themselves to get online and share some of their, “favorite rhymes, riddles, and songs” (Read Strong Site). This is a great way for students to learn new rhymes from other students and then maybe even be able to share rhymes they learn from the Read Strong site with their own classrooms.
One of the most important benefits from the Read Strong site is that it’s material and instruction is totally research based. This way you know the ideas and tips are bound to work most of the time.
Evaluated by Brooke Ellis
2.
Resource: http://www.actionfactor.com/pages/lesson-plans/v0.01-recognizing-rhyme.html
The website opens up with the objectives of the lesson, and then a section as to what the concept of rhyming is, as well as phonetic awareness. It goes on to explain that phonetic awareness is a critical pre-reading skill that students need to require early on. This paragraph is a good section to explain to parents how reading and comprehension builds up with steps, and goes to show how important it is to have children involved in literacy activities at an early age. It gives good examples on how to expose children to rhyming at an early age, all in interactive and fun manners. This article also stresses the fact that rhyming is something that is auditory, not visual. Children learn from repetition and rhythm, which helps kids that can’t read be able to understand how to make a rhyming scheme. This article does a good job on what to expect with rhyming at an early stage and age, in comparison to making vague generalizations on development, that maybe would confuse children if jumping around with different levels of difficulty. A drawback of this article, is that the teacher or whoever it is that is enforcing the lesson, has to have specific materials and items to give the lesson. The mini charts and CD’s needed, are specific on which track to use during the activity as well as which chart. The author gives suggestions on making the lesson more exciting by adding musical instruments.
The article gives very descriptive and thorough procedure on how to administer the activity. Although that would be very beneficial when giving this lesson in a home setting, it provides strict guidelines for teachers. The person giving the lesson has to follow the chart specifically, and is limited to rhyme with what is on the page. In a way, the procedure is too scripted, even telling the teacher/parent what exactly to say, and such a script could make the lesson seem less friendly or caring. I think that if the teacher or parents does an activity like this with pictures and words that are more relatable to the child, that they will understand and be more interested in the concept of finding rhyming words for that picture.
After the procedure there is a follow up section to test the child’s comprehension , as well as an extension section, so that the child is able to build on what they already learned. What I really like about this article, is that it gives suggestions on how to assess if the student understood the activity, but the form of the assessments are low anxiety and more relaxed, offering a more beneficial setting for younger students.
This can illustrate good teaching because all teachers need to be able to interact with their kids in a fun and exciting way. What I am concerned about in this, is that the teacher would need to be able to adapt the lesson, and maybe not follow the procedure word for word. Overall I believe that this is a good idea and activity to be able to branch off of and teach early phonetical awareness with rhyming to children that are younger and not literate. This lesson can be beneficial in the classroom, or even at home in a more lax setting with musical instruments and other household items that the child can make noise and rhythm with.
Evaluated by Jordan Farmer
3.
Generating Rhymes: Developing Phonemic Awareness
The Read Write Think website discusses the idea of phonemic awareness and a variety of activities that teachers may use in their classrooms to help students develop phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is “the awareness that speech consists of a sequence of sounds” (From Theory to Practice). This type of instruction should be used in early reading level classes in the form of storytelling, word games, rhymes, and riddles. This website specifically discusses how generating rhymes can help students become “aware of word and letter patterns that will help them develop decoding skills” (Overview).
The activities explained in the Instruction Plan category make phonemic awareness instruction playful and engaging for young students. There are four sections to the lesson plan, the first section, Session 1, describes a creative way to introduce the term “rhyming” to your students by using a fun activity that involves matching words that rhyme and singing a song. The second, Session 2, involves two more activities that allow children to practice rhyming. The first activity is a guided instruction and the second activity is an independent instruction. The third session of the lesson plan is for modifications or extensions to the previous activities. The students are given the opportunity to generalize rhyming and use it in different contexts. Lastly, the students have an independent task worksheet, which is an assessment or reflection for the teacher to see how well the students understand the concept of rhyming.
This lesson plan is very organized and goes through a variety of steps that allow the teacher to introduce the concept, model the concept, provide guided and independent practice, and assess the understanding of the concept. Going through each of these steps will further the understanding of rhyming for the children and allow them to comprehend why it is important. A limitation to this lesson plan is that it would take a long time for the students to get through each activity and the activities are somewhat repetitive. If the lesson plan was shortened to only playing one matching game, singing one song, and doing one worksheet on rhyming, the lesson would be more realistic for young children. The continuous change of activities will help keep the children focused, but will also give them enough experience with this new concept.
This lesson plan could be done all at once in a classroom, or some of the activities could be done in the classroom and the worksheet could be assigned as homework. These activities would also work for multiliteracy classrooms because the teacher can use rhyming words that are very general so that all cultures recognize them, or the teacher may decide to do English rhyming words for the English speakers and Spanish rhyming words for the Spanish speakers. Just by changing the words, the teacher could modify the activity for different language learners. This lesson plan as a whole illustrates good teaching because it goes through the steps of explicit instruction, which allows the learner to easily comprehend the concept and to use it in different contexts. Overall, when children learn about rhyming they are increasing their phonemic awareness, which therefore increasing their language and communication skills.
“Generating Rhymes: Developing Phonemic Awareness.” Read Write Think. 2010. Web. 6 April 2010.
Evaluated by Jeana Sorrels
4.
http://www.teach.virginia.edu/go/wil/rimes_and_rhymes.htm#About
The selected website is designed to strengthen young children’s phonological awareness or exposure to sound structure using rhyming. The program offers weekly downloadable units of instructions featuring thirty nursery rhymes presented in the order of frequency that ending sounds, such as “at,” “it,” and “ill,” appears in the text of primary grade reading material. For example, “Jack and Jill” opens week one with emphasis on the sound, “ill,” and the endings, “oke” and “oak,” are introduced in week twenty-eight with “There Was an Owl”. Furthermore, this classroom plan includes four downloadable items; nursery rhyme cards, rhyming picture sets, riddle rhymes, and teacher lesson plans.
Designed by Webbing in Literacy (WIL) foe Headstart programs, the website program seeks to help students identify unfamiliar words and improve reading skills by promoting the recognition of rhyming words. To accomplish this, the website includes weekly lesson plans that progress from introduction of a new nursery rhyme on Monday to actively using the rhyme in acting, singing, chanting, and riddle rhymes by the end of the week. As a result, the method reflects the principles of good teaching in the form interacting and having fun, as well as doing as much repetition and activity as possible to set in motion motor and brain skills to insure retention and learning. In addition, the easy rhythm of the text and simple picture presentation makes the website a strong resource for second language instruction. Also, teachers can change the weekly order of instruction to meet the needs of a diverse class. Despite the strengths of the program, the lesson plans offer some limitations for classrooms composed of students with varied reading and language skills. Specifically, the plans often insert the introduction of new vocabulary at the risk of confusing students that are not proficient in English. For example, with “Jack and Jill,” the teacher is instructed to ask the student to “touch the crown of your head.”
Consequently, as a future teacher, I can use portions of this website as a resource to help students read more easily and efficiently. That is, using the nursery rhyme cards and rhyming picture sets in the order suggested, I can show how words sound similar so that the students can realize that they have the skill to read unfamiliar words that have the same ending. Furthermore, assigning read from the “Seventy-One Other Take Home Rhymes” included in the program, as homework will provide students with the necessary practice to retain information.
Evaluated by Kathleen Armitage
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