I just finished up a Rimes set that I've been working on for two weeks. The materials are all designed to be printed as photos, for cheaper and easier material assembly.
I ended up writing about pros and cons to using onsets and rimes when teaching reading and spelling, so I thought I'd share that here.
BENEFITS:
1. Rimes can help students understand that words have reliable patterns, and that words that sound the same can be spelled the same.
2. Rimes are easier for students to hear and manipulate than individual speech sounds.
3. Rime patterns allow us to work on beginning blends in isolation. (One of the items in this set - shown at right - is perfect for working on blends. 27 out of the 51 rimes in the set are represented.)
4. Rime patterns introduce the idea of spelling and decoding by analogy:
if the IGHT in “light” says /ie/ + /t/, that probably means that the IGHT I see in
“night” says /ie/ + /t/ as well.
This can help students in the invented spelling stage of development.
5. Once students are comfortable with rimes, you can point out the presence of these patterns in bigger words to make them seem less scary.
LIMITATIONS:
1. Not all words with a certain letter pattern work out: for the -ash rime, there’s cash trash . . . and then wash.
2. A rime set doesn’t cover all the potential spellings of the sound - kite and fight have the same sound pattern. So we need to emphasize that not all words that rhyme are rimes (rhyme is sound, rime is spelling).
3. Some of our language’s most popular bad words coincide with some of our most common rimes (be careful when brainstorming -uck and -it rimes, is what I'm saying).
Then there's the case of how many "most popular rimes" there are.
Whenever I read about rimes, the number of "most common rimes" to use in teaching is 37. What’s interesting about this is that no one seems to agree on WHICH 37 rimes should make the cut. I compared 5 different lists from the internet, and each one was different. The list most referred to is by Wylie & Durrell from 1970*, but I don’t completely agree with their list, either.
Suffice to say, I made word lists, analyzed them, and then made an executive decision about which rimes I would include in this set: there are 51 to choose from. As you are the teacher, you can decide which ones to use with your class!
Here’s a list of all the rimes that are present in my set:
A. ab, ack, ag, ail, ain, ake, ale, all, am, ame, an, ank,
ap, ash, at, ate, aw, ay
E. eat, eed, eep, eet, ell, est, ew
I. ice, ick, ide, ight, ill, in, ine, ing, ink, ip, it
O. ob, ock, oke, old, op, ore, ot, out, ow (show), ow (cow)
U. uck, ug, um, ump, unk
*Richard E. Wylie and Donald D. Durrell, 1970. "Teaching Vowels Through Phonograms," published in Elementary School Journal.
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