Jump to content

Menu

How important is rhyming in AAR prereading?


Mimm
 Share

Recommended Posts

My daughter is obsessed with letters and their sounds and has learned the entire alphabet and the sounds of the letters from an app we let her play and reading Dr Suess' ABC book 4 million times. So I got AAR prereading and she adores it. We never do it unless she asks and sometimes not even then. Mostly we are doing the rhyming words activities which she likes to do but isn't really getting the concept. But she knows all the other stuff at this level. Can we move on or do we really need to wait till she understands rhyming?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My daughter is obsessed with letters and their sounds and has learned the entire alphabet and the sounds of the letters from an app we let her play and reading Dr Suess' ABC book 4 million times. So I got AAR prereading and she adores it. We never do it unless she asks and sometimes not even then. Mostly we are doing the rhyming words activities which she likes to do but isn't really getting the concept. But she knows all the other stuff at this level. Can we move on or do we really need to wait till she understands rhyming?

 

If she knows all of the other phonological awareness skills, and the skills in the other 4 main areas on the Level 1 Readiness Test, she'll probably be fine if you are wanting to move on to level 1. If she's missing several of the phonological awareness skills though, she'll likely have trouble with blending. 

 

There is a progression of phonological awareness skills covered in Pre-reading, including rhyming, oral blending, alliteration and segmenting (being able to identify the individual sounds in a word–last sounds tend to be easiest, then first sounds, then middle sounds), being able to hear the individual words in a sentence (understanding where the word breaks are when we tend to run our words together in everyday speech), being able to hear and clap with the number of syllables in a word, and so on. The more comfortable children are with being able to take words apart and put them back together orally, and the more they understand how our oral language works, the better prepared they are to start a reading program.

 

Here's an article on teaching rhyming with more ideas & resources for you so you can keep working on rhyming. There are actually 3 stages of rhyming, and the article talks about each one and the exercises that correlate to the stages. 

 

You might find this article helpful too: How to Develop Phonological Awareness

 

HTH some!

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

DD started AAR pre right around when she turned 4, and at first really didn't get rhyming, but then after a few long breaks (intentional and otherwise) now at almost age 5, she really gets it, often spontaneously listing rhyming words (including nonsense words she makes up on the fly), and she immediately got syllable counting when we did it a few weeks ago. Mileage may vary, but I've definitely found a lot of things are easier waiting for her to mature or for the concept to sink in, I don't know which.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I wish I had the studies to trot out right now, but I recall reading at some point that rhyming isn't strongly correlated with early reading skills. My sister teaches English language learners (grade K) and they often are able to read (at a K level) before they can identify rhyming words. My own kids had no problem with rhyming and would play rhyming games with me when they were 3 and 4, but weren't/aren't early readers..so anecdotally, too, it's not necessarily tied to decoding ability!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I wish I had the studies to trot out right now, but I recall reading at some point that rhyming isn't strongly correlated with early reading skills. My sister teaches English language learners (grade K) and they often are able to read (at a K level) before they can identify rhyming words. My own kids had no problem with rhyming and would play rhyming games with me when they were 3 and 4, but weren't/aren't early readers..so anecdotally, too, it's not necessarily tied to decoding ability!

I agree with this 100%

 

My 3.5 year old can rhyme well with real and nonsense words. He's not reading early

 

I did have one who rhymed early and was an early reader.

 

But I find that some kids can blend before rhyming. I would want to make sure OPs kiddo met the other phonological awareness skills.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

We are currently using AAR pre-reading with my oldest son, so I have no background for how important rhyming is to reading. I do know it took him a few lessons to get the rhyming, but working on rhyming was my goal of his preschool at age 3 (nothing else associated with reading). So I did some lessons, but mostly followed this: http://curry.virginia.edu/go/wil/rimes_and_rhymes.htm   It's a lot of fun and we enjoyed it so if you want to work on rhyming (to just work on it or as it relates to reading) I highly recommend it. Plus nursery rhymes are just fun and I tried to find books to go along with the theme and we found some great books that way (the Gregory Griggs/wig rhyme had tons of fun hair books!)

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Both mine learnt to read easily but not until they went to school at 5. The second got rhyming at 4 the first at about 5.5. Weirdly he could tell you from looking that the rhymed but not from hearing. We used to play odd one out - frog, dog, butterfly. The answer is dog of course - it is the only mammal :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thank you! I feel better focusing on what she's really interested in. :) I'll look at other phonological awareness skills and see if any of those click with her.

 

Rhyming in and of itself isn't going to be a "make or break" kind of thing for reading. The absolute most important precursor for reading is “motivation to read," and your daughter seems to have that one! On the other hand, if a student struggles with many phonological awareness skills, then they are going to have trouble with blending and decoding skills. Rhyming is just one helpful tool that can help to build up those skills.

 

If she's resistant to working on rhyming, you can certainly take a break from it for awhile. But if not, then gently move on but continue to incorporate activities that can help with reading. You can work on building up her "ear" for rhyming by reading lots of rhyming books to her. Nursery rhymes, rhyming games, songs, poems…anything that she wouldn’t mind hearing over and over again can help her develop in this area. Then try the exercises again later.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...