Sort the Rhymes: Write Each Bank Word Under Its Rhyme Head

A numbered picture bank runs across the top of this 1st grade rhyming-words page — a log, a car, a frog, a bat, a guitar, a hat — and beneath it three tall columns, each headed by one big picture: a dog, a star, a cat. Two handwriting rules wait in every column. The child says each bank picture, finds the head picture it rhymes with, and writes its word on a line in that column: log and frog under the dog, car and guitar under the star, bat and hat under the cat. Six bank words, three columns, two words each, and the head words themselves are never written.

Sorting is where a rhyme becomes a family. The rhyme-and-write page asks the child to find one partner for one picture; here three rhyme heads are open at once and every bank word has to be tested against all three before it is placed. That is harder than it looks for a six-year-old, because the bank is spoken, not read — the words are pictures, and the child supplies the spelling from the sound. The teacher can see the whole result at a glance: a column with three words or one word tells you which rhyme the child could not hear. Guitar under the star is the row worth talking about.

It prints on one sheet with columns wide enough for a first grader's handwriting. Use it after the rhyme-and-write page and before the rhyme-strings page, where the bank is words rather than pictures and some words fit nowhere. The finish-the-rhyme page changes the format completely, giving the child two lines of verse and one blank to fill.