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This post has been co-written with Ben Wolfson, a full-time educator and assistant principal in the USA.
There’s nothing more exciting for young readers than learning word families and the ability to decode and understand new words all by themselves. This simple skill opens up the whole world of books and literature, and sets the foundation for all of their reading work in the years to come. One of the key skills to improve phonemic awareness is blending onset and rime. The onset of a word is the initial phonological unit (usually a single letter, but students will need to know that digraphs are common onsets), while the rime is the latter part of the word, usually a vowel (or vowel team) and a group of consonants. In this all-in-one packet, you’ll get over 130 CVC words that help with learning word families based on onsets and rime groupings.
Pre-Requisite Skills For Onset and Rime
As an early literacy teacher, you need to know how to teach onset and rime in a logical teaching sequence. Make sure that students have mastered their letter sounds and have a good bank of sight words to help them make sense of longer sentences and books before attempting onset-rime segmentation. Students need to be able to understand that each word is made up of different letters and need to be able to hear the different sounds in order to practice blending onset and rime. These simple word puzzles improve phonemic awareness by providing multiple opportunities for segmenting words into their onset and rime, and can be used both as a listening, reading and writing literacy center.
Preparing CVC Onset Rime Puzzles
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Teaching With CVC Onset Rime Puzzles
Only a handful of kindergarten students will be able to complete these addition and subtraction worksheets for kindergarten independently. To help scaffold the activity to get success for everyone, try some of these activities:
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Act it out – acting it out keeps the storytelling aspect of word problems alive, and you’ll never see higher engagement from your students as they pretend to be the characters in the word problem. You can teach a lot of social skills about turn-taking and make-believe while helping them visualize the word problem, as well as having some fun working out how to make oranges roll off a table or finding robots for a shelf.
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Draw pictures – while most students will enjoy the fine motor practice of cutting out the images on the right-hand side of each worksheet to manipulate, there will be more artistic-minded students who want to draw the word problem. This should be encouraged as it will be an excellent strategy as they move the grades and the word problems become more complex.
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Repeat the reading – finally, you can work with students on each page and underline the tricky words (often the key nouns and verbs). Rehearse these words with them using flashcards so that when you come to the worksheet in future weeks, they can read and solve the problem themselves. If you’re worried that they’ll remember the equation instead of solving the word problem, simply white out the numbers and choose your own.