Finish the Rhyme: Write the Missing Word in Six Short Verses

Two lines of verse and one blank: that is each of the six cards on this 1st grade rhyming-words page. The first line ends in the rhyme word and the second line stops at a blank: We had some fun in the sun, and ate a sticky ______. At night I sleep in my warm bed, by day I ride my snowy ______. Up in the sky I saw a star, and down the road I saw a ______. A picture at the left of each card — a bun, a sled, a car, a frog, a spoon, a flag — shows the missing word, so the child reads the two lines out loud, hears that the last word must rhyme with sun or bed or star, and writes it on the handwriting rule. The cow jumps over the moon in the fifth verse, and the dish runs off with the spoon.

This is the face of the family that connects rhyme to reading. The other pages work with single words; here the rhyme sits at the end of a line the child has to read, with rhythm and sense pulling toward the answer at the same time as the sound does. A child who cannot yet decode every word can still finish the verse from the picture and the rhyme, which is exactly how nursery rhymes teach reading in the first place. The teacher reads the first line with the child and stops at the blank; the pause is where the rhyme is heard. Every answer is a short word whose rhyme is spelled like its partner.

The verses are printed in a large reading size and the page prints on one sheet. It works well read aloud in a group before anyone writes. The rhyme-and-write page and the sort-the-rhymes page are the picture-only steps before it, and the write-your-own-rhymes page is the one after, where no verse and no bank are given and the child invents the rhyming words.