Rhyming Words

These fifteen words make five rhyming groups, and every one of them has the same vowel sound. That is what makes this the first sheet to do: your child cannot sort them by the middle sound, because the middle sound never changes. The only thing that tells the columns apart is the rhyme.

Say each group out loud before you cut anything: cat, hat, bat. Map, cap, tap. Can, fan, van. Bag, tag, rag. Ham, jam, ram.

The picture sort covers four of the five endings. Map, cap and tap are on the cards and on the odd one out sheet instead: the drawing of a cap is one a child often calls a hat, and on a sorting sheet with no words on it that lands them in the wrong column through no fault of their own.

The picture sort asks for no reading at all. The word cards do print the words, so they are the sheet for a grown-up to hold: deal them face down in pairs and let your child turn two over, and a pair is won when the two words rhyme.

The odd one out sheet is the one to print last, and you read it aloud. Six rows of three pictures, and your child circles the one that does not rhyme. Say all three words yourself before they choose: the word is printed under each picture for you, not for them, so it works with a child who cannot read a letter.

Three endings and three different vowels, so this sheet is easier than it looks. On the short a sort every word had the same vowel and the ending was the only clue. Here the vowels differ too, which gives a child who is still finding their feet a second way in.

Say each group out loud before you cut: pig, wig, twig. Hen, pen, ten. Bug, rug, mug.

The odd one out sheet uses the same nine pictures and asks the opposite question. Instead of sorting them into columns, your child sees three at a time and circles the one that does not rhyme. You say the three words; the printed word under each picture is there so you are not guessing at somebody else’s drawing.

Nine pictures rather than fifteen, and that is deliberate. Every picture on this page has been checked to make sure it reads as its own word: a drawing of a jet that a child calls a plane would send them to the wrong column through no fault of their own. Where a rhyme family had no clear picture, its words are in the next section instead, on cards.

Five more endings, fifteen words, and a grown-up reads them out. Mop, top, hop. Dog, log, frog. Sun, bun, run. Pot, dot, hot. Tub, cub, sub.

These families have no picture sort, and the reason is worth knowing. A picture sort only works when every drawing says its own word: if your child looks at a drawing of a hog and says “pig”, they have named the picture correctly and landed in the wrong column. Rather than print sheets that do that, these words are on cards, where you say the word and the ambiguity never arises.

They do have an odd one out sheet, and the difference is one line of print. That sheet puts the word under each picture, for you rather than for your child, so you say “run” and the drawing of a running boy stops being a guess. Three pictures a row, and your child circles the one that does not rhyme. It is the sheet to use when you want to know whether the rhyming has landed, rather than to practise it again. The -ub row is the newest: tub and cub rhyme, mop does not, and the three pictures there are the ones you will most want to name aloud first.

How to play the cards. Deal them face down in a grid. Your child turns two over, you read both aloud, and they keep them if the two words rhyme. Each ending has three cards, so there is more than one right pair to find in each family, which keeps the game going longer than a matching game usually does. For a shorter turn, deal one or two families rather than all four.

This group is for you rather than for your child. Rhyming is about sound, so a pair can rhyme perfectly and share almost no letters, and a pair can share almost every letter and not rhyme at all.

• Said rhymes with bed. Not one letter of the ending matches.
• One rhymes with sun, and eye rhymes with pie.
• Through rhymes with blue, and through does not rhyme with rough, which is spelled almost identically.

Why it matters before your child can read: it does not, and that is the point. A three-year-old sorting pictures is only listening, so none of this is confusing to them. It becomes confusing later, when the same child meets the words on a page and has been told that rhyming words look alike.

So do not say that. When you are playing the games, say that rhyming words sound the same at the end. It is the accurate version and it is the version that keeps working.

When your child can hear that cat and hat rhyme, the next step is reading the same endings rather than hearing them. That is a word family, and it is the same set of words with the listening turned into looking.

• The word families are on CVC words, a section each for -at, -an, -ap, -ad, -ag and twenty more, with worksheets that print the words instead of pictures.
• If rhyming itself is not landing yet, do not move on. How to teach rhyming has the four steps in order and what to do when your child can hear a rhyme but not make one.
• If you want to practise away from a table, rhyming activities has the games that need nothing at all, which is most of them.
• If your child is already reading short words, rhyming is behind them and the useful next page is short vowel words, which mixes all five vowels.

Rhyming is one of several listening skills, and it is not the only one worth playing with. Hearing the sounds in words covers the rest of them and says which ones matter most for reading later.

Rhyming is the earliest of those skills, and the later, sound-by-sound end of the same ladder is the part with the strongest evidence behind it: the National Reading Panel found that teaching children to hear and move individual sounds “significantly improves their reading more than instruction that lacks any attention to PA”. The panel is equally clear that this listening work “does not constitute a complete reading program” on its own, which is why the page above sends you to letters next.