Onset and Rime Activities

Similar to teaching beginning readers about rhyme, teaching children about onset and rime helps them recognize common chunks within words. This can help students decode new words when reading and spell words when writing.

The "onset" is the initial phonological unit of any word (e.g. c in cat) and the term "rime" refers to the string of letters that follow, usually a vowel and final consonants (e.g. at in cat). Not all words have onsets.

Why teach about onset and rimes?

• They help children learn about word families, which can lay the foundation for future spelling strategies
• Teaching children to attend to onset and rime will have a positive effect on their literacy skills
• Learning these components of phonological awareness is strongly predictive of reading and spelling acquisition

Examples

From the Florida Center for Reading Research, download and print these activities:

• Onset and Rime Slide
• Rime House
• Rime Closed Sort
• Speedy Rime Words

These articles offer suggestions for how to use simple onset and rime activities to help students develop phonological awareness.

• Tuning In to the Sounds of Words
• How Now Brown Cow: Phoneme Awareness Activities

Construct-a-word: "ig" in Pig. The link below outlines a strategy that can be adapted to teach different onset and rime word patterns. This activity helps teachers isolate and teach the rime "ig" using the book If you Give a Pig a Pancake by Laura Numeroff. There is an instructional plan that accompanies the activity and extension ideas included to advance the learning process.
See example >

Download blank templates

There are several downloadable pages on the links below for building word families using onset and rimes.

• Word family builders
• Onset and rime tiles

Differentiated instruction for second language learners, students of varying reading skill, and for younger learners

• Have students create and write word sorts of the target word pattern
• Use pictures instead of words in activities for younger and lower level readers

Taken from Reading Rockets