Write Your Own Rhymes: Two Words That Rhyme with Each Printed Word

Nothing is supplied on this 1st grade rhyming-words page except a word and its picture. Six cards, two across and three down, each show a picture with its word printed in large type beside it: tree, guitar, coat, bat, log, bun. Under each word are two handwriting rules and nothing else — no bank, no choices, no pictures to circle. The child reads the word, thinks of two words that rhyme with it, and writes one on each line. There is no single right answer: bee and key, sea and three, or any two real words that rhyme with tree all count.

Producing a rhyme is the last step of the skill, and it is the one that shows whether the child owns it. On every other page in this family the rhyming word is somewhere on the paper; here it has to come out of the child's own vocabulary and be spelled from sound, which makes the page part rhyme and part invented spelling. That is fine — cote for coat is a correct rhyme with a spelling to fix later, and the teacher should read the answers aloud rather than check them against a list. Guitar is the stretch card; car and star are the easy rhymes, and a child who finds jar has been listening to the end of the word.

The page prints on one sheet and the printed word is large enough for a child to copy the ending. The answer key lists the common rhymes for each word as examples, not as the only accepted answers. Keep this page for the end of the rhyming-words sequence, after the rhyme-and-write page and the rhyme-strings page; a child who struggles here should go back to the bank pages, where the words are supplied.