AAR Rhyming Question

[Holly]

I am using the AAR Pre-Level 1 program with my 4yo.  There are lots of "pick the rhyming pair" type of games.  He is not hearing the rhymes, even with some prompting.  One game has me set out three cards, for example: cat, hat, and ring.  He will choose hat and ring (or similar).

Do you think this is something we can work on or a developmental issue that just needs time?  I really don't want to waste time on it if it won't really help him along, but the type A part of my personality is bugged by skipping this part of the lesson.  If it's something that just needs a bit of practice, I'd like to go ahead with the games.  Has anyone else had this issue?  I honestly can't remember when my older ones picked up on rhyming. 

Ironically, I've probably read more Dr. Seuss books to this kid than all my older kids put together. 

[acresoft]

Don't worry about it he's pretty young.

[knitgrl]

Our dd at age five could not rhyme for the life of her, but she learned to read despite having that issue and is an excellent reader now.

Edited August 4, 2018 by knitgrl

[Pintosrock]

YES, oh good grief yes! Those rhyming games are so horribly, incredibly frustrating over here. Tears, screams, meltdowns galore! I finally got it through my own thick skull that we don't need to follow a program this strictly. Instead, we read some poems or nursery rhymes. We're still in this phase, so I don't know how it will affect her ability to read or progress to AAR1... (No help here, just commiseration that you're not the only one!)

[MerryAtHope]

He may not understand what you mean by rhyming yet, or he may not be quite developmentally ready. I'd try working on it in different ways (try reading lots of rhyming books to your son. Nursery rhymes, rhyming games, songs, poems…anything that he wouldn’t mind hearing over and over again, playing games like Miss Mary Mack, etc...) There are actually three stages of rhyming: hearing, recognizing, and producing rhyme. Marie has a description and some activity ideas in her blog article, 5 Ways to Teach Rhyming.

Sometimes a child will have trouble with one area of phonological awareness skills and yet do fine with others and learning to read--but if they struggle with several skills, it can make learning to read difficult. The phonological awareness skills in Pre-reading generally build on each other.

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.

So--you can try moving on and see how it goes, and meanwhile keep working on rhyming. But if you notice trouble with a lot of skills, you'll probably want to just focus on learning letters for awhile, take a break from the phonological awareness skills, and try again in a few months. 

At this stage, it's really important to keep lesson times upbeat and enjoyable--so if he's really frustrated, don't be afraid to take a break. Have fun with your little one!

[Tanaqui]

There are other ways to teach rhyming. If this is frustrating your kid - drop it! Especially at four, it's just not that crucial.

[PeterPan]

Here's a chart with ages where 80-90% can be doing the task.  http://www.readingrockets.org/article/development-phonological-skills  My ds was not recognizing rhymes at that age and did get diagnosed with SLDs, but that was in the context of other odd things. Keep an eye on it, keep exposing lots of ways. You're doing the right things. There *is* a CTOPP normed to 4-6 and some dyslexia schools will do screenings for kids entering K5. It's actually a thing, because they can identify at risk kids that early. But that's age 5, not a young 4. A year can make a huge difference. I would look at the total context. Like if he's in speech therapy, he's not hearing sounds, he's having trouble clapping with you, having trouble doing more age-typical things (basic puzzles, etc.), not responding to his name if he's not looking at the person, having trouble understanding you in noisy environments, struggling with more components in AAR pre, having articulation difficulties, having motor planning difficulties, etc., then you go ok, we're seeing more. 

My ds needed more kinesthetic, more hands-on, more explicit instruction than AAR pre. I like AAR pre (cute, organized well, LOVE Ziggy, etc.), but some kids do need more help, sure. But I would look at the context of what you've got going on, see how he learns, bring in some other methodologies. How is his language? Phonological processing develops naturally, even if you don't work on it, so you could totally put aside AAR pre, work just on narrative language, sign language, playing games together (SO important!), come back to it in 6 months, and see what happens. If he's 4, probably that's going to be the advice even if there does turn out to be something else going on. 

You want a weird story? My ds is diagnosed with dyslexia (and dyscalculia and dysgraphia, and autism and ADHD and ODD and.. but who's counting, lol) and we did rhyming explicitly with LIPS (a hands-on methodology with tiles) and Barton (the expensive dyslexia program). He learned it, could basically do it, but it was hard. He's diagnosed dyslexic, so I thought fine, that's just how it is that it's hard for him. Well over the last few months we've been doing language, really building his expressive language, and you know what he can now do? YUP, RHYME. That's what I was saying when the phonological development is actually a natural progression in language development. They understand words and then they begin to understand the parts of words. My ds didn't really understand words at the word level, because he had memorized (scripted) so much language with his autism. 

So building LANGUAGE, just literally playing games with him, reading picture dictionaries, naming things, talking about attributes of things, playing categorizing games, working through the preschool play cards in the MFW kit (LOVE these, you'll love 'em) using lots of language, this stuff is actually developmentally appropriate for helping rhyming come in! It's not a rabbit trail or a waste of time.  

[zejh]

My dd also had trouble with the rhyming games when she'd just turned 4.  I dropped it for a month or so, not entirely intentionally, but by the time we picked it back up, she was spontaneously rhyming correctly for fun.  Sometimes, I'll just have her watch me and the zebra play a game together, and the next week, she gets the idea easily.  (Usual caveat that every kid is different...)

[Holly]

Thanks for the help & suggestions!  I'll be checking out the 5 Ways to Teach Rhyming link!  I really should take a closer look at their website.  "Get out of the Wagon" is actually the game we were playing (and on that 5 Ways list).  lol

That chart was helpful, and it looks like 5 is a more normal time to expect them to hear the rhymes.  We aren't there quite yet!  ?

We will definitely continue with rhymes and poems--he can't get enough of those!  I may get out the rhyming cards from time to time and see how it goes.

Edited August 6, 2018 by Holly

[Holly]

4 minutes ago, zejh said:

My dd also had trouble with the rhyming games when she'd just turned 4.  I dropped it for a month or so, not entirely intentionally, but by the time we picked it back up, she was spontaneously rhyming correctly for fun.  Sometimes, I'll just have her watch me and the zebra play a game together, and the next week, she gets the idea easily.  (Usual caveat that every kid is different...)

 

Love the idea of him watching me play the games with Ziggy!  He loves Ziggy and that would take the pressure off of him. 

Edited August 6, 2018 by Holly

[Mimm]

My four year old still doesn't get rhyming. And I didn't let it stop us from moving forward.

[8filltheheart]

Rhyming is one of those pre-reading phonemic awareness skills. (Being able to identify final sounds is another.) Reading Dr. Suess books is great. Has he memorized them? Maybe read them and stop and let him guess/say the next word. Approach it like a game. Do you know what's next??  Cup Pup, Pup on _______.  One thumb, one thumb drumming on a _______.  Sing children's rhyming songs. Learn poems. Play games like I Spy with rhyming words, etc. All are fun ways to expose them to sounds without taking the approach of teaching them to read.

Pressing forward with teaching them to read may not gain you much. Just doing absolutely nothing other than letting their brains mature and trying when they a little older might actually end up with them further ahead bc they don't experience the same level of frustration in learning to read and have more immediate success. Without phonemic awareness learning to read can be a huge struggle. 

Fwiw, I have never attempted to teach a 4 yr old to read or even their letters, so my bias is to wait. My kids start K without pre-school activities and learn their letter sounds in K. Even at 5  final sounds can be an issue. If my kids are still struggling with final sounds at 5, we just continue doing the same phonemic awareness games similar to what I described in my first paragraph (that's just parenting from my perspective) that we have done their whole lives.

[zejh]

2 hours ago, 8FillTheHeart said:

Rhyming is one of those pre-reading phonemic awareness skills. (Being able to identify final sounds is another.) Reading Dr. Suess books is great. Has he memorized them? Maybe read them and stop and let him guess/say the next word. Approach it like a game. Do you know what's next??  Cup Pup, Pup on _______.  One thumb, one thumb drumming on a _______.  Sing children's rhyming songs. Learn poems. Play games like I Spy with rhyming words, etc. All are fun ways to expose them to sounds without taking the approach of teaching them to read.

Pressing forward with teaching them to read may not gain you much. Just doing absolutely nothing other than letting their brains mature and trying when they a little older might actually end up with them further ahead bc they don't experience the same level of frustration in learning to read and have more immediate success. Without phonemic awareness learning to read can be a huge struggle. 

Fwiw, I have never attempted to teach a 4 yr old to read or even their letters, so my bias is to wait. My kids start K without pre-school activities and learn their letter sounds in K. Even at 5  final sounds can be an issue. If my kids are still struggling with final sounds at 5, we just continue doing the same phonemic awareness games similar to what I described in my first paragraph (that's just parenting from my perspective) that we have done their whole lives.

I've gone *extremely* slowly with pre-level 1, that is, she had just turned 4 when we started, and we're almost 2/3's the way through and she'll be 6 in a few months.  She enjoys it, and we stop any time it's in any way not fun, and, admittedly, when I started I wasn't 100% sure she'd be homeschooled even for kindergarten, so I wanted to get something phonetic started before they started trying to push memorizing sight words.  Now that we've settled on homeschooling (at least for kindergarten), I can actually relax a bit more.