How to Teach Rhyming

Rhyming is taught by ear, and almost all of the work is the hearing half. Hearing that two words rhyme comes a long way before being able to make one up, so the order is: fill in the rhyme in a book your child knows, decide whether two spoken words end the same way, pick the odd one out of three, and only then make one up. Nonsense words count at every step.

If your four-year-old cannot do the last one, that is normal. The Common Core standards expect a child to recognize and produce rhyming words by the end of kindergarten, not before it.

What are rhyming words?

Two words rhyme when they sound the same from the vowel onward. In cat, hat and bat everything past the first sound is identical. Cat and car do not rhyme, because the ending is where they differ, and that is the part that has to match.

Spelling has nothing to do with it. This is the part parents most often get wrong, and it matters later even though it does not matter now:

• said rhymes with bed, sharing not one letter of the ending
• one rhymes with sun, and eye rhymes with pie
• through rhymes with blue, and does not rhyme with rough

While your child is still working by ear, none of this can confuse them, because they are only listening. It becomes confusing later, if they have been told that rhyming words look alike. So say that rhyming words sound the same at the end, which stays true.

Rhyming is the largest, easiest chunk of sound a child can pick out of a word, which is why it comes first in the listening skills that sit under reading. Hearing the sounds in words covers the rest of them.

Should we be doing rhyming or phonics?

You do not have to choose, and rhyming is not a gate in front of phonics.

This is worth stating plainly because the opposite is so widely implied. Rhyming does come first in most published sequences, and that is a fact about ease rather than about prerequisites. A child who can push c, a and t together into cat is already doing something harder than rhyming: they are working with single sounds, where rhyming works with a whole chunk.

So the failure to avoid is holding a five-year-old back from letter sounds until rhyming is fluent. If your child is ready for letters, teach letters. What order to teach phonics has the sequence, and rhyming sits alongside its first stage rather than in front of it.

There is a second reason not to treat rhyming as a hurdle. The research linking rhyming to later reading is real, but it is correlational and weaker than the link for hearing individual sounds in a word. The National Reading Panel reviewed the evidence on phonemic awareness teaching and found the clearest gains came from working with a word’s individual sounds, pushing them together and pulling them apart, rather than from working with larger chunks. Rhyming is the larger chunk.

Rhyming is worth doing. It is not worth blocking on.

When do children learn to rhyme?

Two ages matter. Children start noticing rhymes in the preschool years, mostly on their own, through nursery rhymes, songs and books. Being able to produce one is expected by the end of kindergarten: the Common Core standard RF.K.2a asks a kindergartner to “recognize and produce rhyming words”, and names no earlier age.

Rhyming itself arrives in three stages, and they are worth telling apart because a child can be solidly in one of them and unable to do the next:

Stage	What it looks like	Usually
Noticing	Joins in or laughs when a story rhymes	Age 3 to 4, often unprompted
Spotting	Answers yes when you ask if cat and hat rhyme	Age 4 to 5
Producing	Gives you a rhyme for bug when you ask for one	By the end of kindergarten

The common mistake is expecting production first. “Tell me a word that rhymes with cat” is the version most adults reach for, and it is the last step, not the first. A child who cannot answer it may still be perfectly able to tell you that cat and hat sound alike.

Hearing the sounds in words has the full table of which listening skills arrive when, and this page does not repeat it.

How to teach rhyming, step by step

Four steps, in order. Each one is a thing you say out loud, and none of them needs paper.

1. 1

   Read a rhyming book and stop before the rhyme

   Read something your child knows by heart, and pause just before the second rhyming word. Let them fill it in. This is the easiest possible version of the skill, because the rhythm and the story are both carrying them, and it is the one to start on.

2. 2

   Ask whether two words sound the same at the end

   Say cat and hat, then ask whether they finish the same way. Then say cat and dog and ask again. Two words at a time, spoken, with nothing to read. A child has to hear the difference before they can be asked to find it.

3. 3

   Play odd one out with three words

   Cat, hat, dog. Which one does not belong? Three spoken words is harder than two because your child has to hold all three, and it is the step most children are on for the longest. Say them slowly and say them twice.

4. 4

   Ask your child to make a rhyme up

   Tell me a word that rhymes with bug. Nonsense words count, and saying so out loud is the permission most children need: zug and mug are both correct answers, because both prove your child is working from the sound rather than from a word they already know.

Step 3 is where most children spend the longest, and that is fine. Three spoken words is a real jump from two, because your child has to hold all three in mind while comparing them.

How often: minutes, daily, out loud. In the car, in the bath, in a queue. This is not a sit-down activity and it does not improve for being one.

For things to actually play, rhyming activities has the games. For picture sheets that practise steps 2 and 3 on paper, rhyming words has two of them, sorted by ending, plus a set of rhyming cards.

What if my child cannot rhyme?

First: at four, this is common and it is not a flag. The standard is the end of kindergarten.

The usual cause is that production was asked for before hearing was solid. Almost every child who “cannot rhyme” has been asked step 4 and never step 2. Drop back:

• Go from making to spotting. Stop asking for a rhyme. Ask whether two words rhyme instead, and stay there for as long as it takes.
• Say nonsense words are allowed, in those words. Some children are stuck not on the sound but on the belief that the answer has to be a real thing.
• Use words they love. Their own name, a favourite character, whatever they talk about anyway.
• Shorten it. Two or three exchanges and stop. A rhyming game that outlasts a child’s interest teaches them that rhyming is tiring.

When it is worth raising with someone. Not noticing rhyme at all, well past the fourth birthday, together with trouble across other listening skills, is worth a word with your child’s teacher. Rhyme on its own, at four, is not. Hearing the sounds in words has the fuller list of signs and what each one means.

How to tell it has landed

Three checks, at a kitchen table, in about a minute. This is not an assessment and there is no score.

1. The pair check. “Do pin and win rhyme? Do pin and pig?” Four or five pairs, mixed.
2. The odd one out check. “Sun, bun, cat.” Three or four sets.
3. The made-up check. “Tell me a word that rhymes with hop.” Accept anything that rhymes.

A child who passes the first two and not the third is partway through, not stuck. That is the normal place to be at four, and the answer is more of steps 1 to 3 rather than more of step 4.

The rhyming words picture sorts are the paper version of check 2, and your child can do them without reading anything.

What comes after rhyming

The same word endings, read instead of heard. That is a word family: once your child can hear that cat and hat rhyme, the next thing is seeing that they share -at on the page.

CVC words teaches those families, a section each for -at, -an, -ap, -ad, -ag and twenty more, and it is the natural next page when the listening is solid.