Rhyming Words

Since Gess has Down syndrome there are many things that she struggles with.  While she can identify rhyming words, it is often difficult for her to actually tell what word rhymes when she is not given choices. This week in speech therapy our therapist gave us a nice little tool to give her a visual clue for rhyming words.

Using a white board or chalk board or even index cards you make a card list using only consonants. You can also choose to leave out q and x if you want.

Then you ask the child to rhyme a word and write that word to the side.  "What rhymes with cat?"

To help aid them in seeing what they are looking for to make the word rhyme you take away the first letter and leave the other two like this.

Then you lead them to look at the letters on the side and see if any of those work to make words that rhyme.  When they choose a letter that doesn't make a word you just let them know that isn't a word.  You continue on writing down the words they come up with.

You encourage the right words by giving positive feedback with phrases like, "that's a great word" or "I like that word."  Gess really loved it when the therapist said that. 

After awhile the child doesn't need as much visual help.  You can drop the ______at and just write the word and eventually just orally ask for rhyming word using only the letters as clues.  Gess picked it up rather quickly and came up with great rhyming words which was great when without the cue she came up blank.  Oh, she can rhyme words like cat but once you start rhyming tougher words she just didn't know how to find the answers.  This simple visual aid is an excellent tool that helped her figure out what to do.  The goal is to not need it at all anymore.  Once they start thinking about the letters in their head they can do it alone, but in the mean time at least they know how to do it.