All year, you’ve watched your child’s vocabulary grow like a garden of wildflowers. You’ve watered, weeded, and spread plenty of sunshine with family read-aloud times, spelling lessons, and writing games. This week, help your child display what she’s learned with a colorful “garden” of rhyming words!
Kindergarten or First Grade: Word Family Flowers
A word family is a set of words with similar sounds and spelling patterns, such as set, jet, bet, and met. To help your child make a word family flower, you’ll need to gather a few supplies:
- A blank sheet of white copy paper
- A stem and leaves cut from green paper, and a circular flower center cut from yellow paper
- Flower petals cut from bright or pastel paper
- Glue sticks
Together, write a word family ending in the middle of the flower, such as -at. Now, choose simple rhyming words like rat and cat that will fit in this family. (Rhyming picture books are a great place to help your child find words!) Help her write one word on each flower petal. Finally, help your child arrange the pieces into a beautiful flower on the white paper, and glue it all in place.
The -at word family flower is now ready for display! Wouldn’t this be a pretty addition to your schoolroom or writing center? I’m confident your little gardeners won’t want to stop with just one flower. Make more flowers with word endings such as –en,–ot, –ike, and–ill.
When the flowers are completed, display them on the wall. Alternatively, three-hole punch each page (or slip pages into sheet protectors) and store them together in a notebook. Let your child decorate a notebook cover page with the title “My Garden of Rhyming Words.”
1st, 2nd, or 3rd Grade: Rhyme Gardens
As your children develop their reading and spelling skills, they might start to notice that some rhyming words are spelled very differently. Help them visualize the relationship between these homophones with a rhyme garden. First, gather:
- A sheet of white paper
- Tulip flowers cut from brightly-colored paper
- Crayons, markers, or colored pencils to draw stems and leaves
- Glue sticks
Your child will enjoy arranging the tulips and adding greenery on the white paper. For this first rhyme garden, choose a familiar ending sound, such as –ate. Help your child write a variety of rhyming words in the garden, one word on each tulip, such as late, eight, great, straight, and wait. Other word families include –o (go, row, hoe, though, and sew) and –air (hair, where, bear, stare, and their). Remind your kids to practice pronouncing these words out loud while they are writing or coloring.
These rhyme gardens can be added to the child’s three-ring notebook, or used to decorate the refrigerator and bedroom closet doors!
Variation
Give your kids a long sheet of white butcher paper. Every twelve inches or so, start a new rhyme garden with different color flowers. For instance, use
- yellow tulips for show, go, and toe;
- orange tulips for score, roar, and door;
- purple tulips for bird, word, and herd; and
- blue tulips for threw, blue, and do.
Encourage your children to keep adding to their “flower field” as they encounter and master new words.
These rhyming word activities come from WriteShop Primary A and B by Nancy I. Sanders. If you like what you see, be sure check out the entire WriteShop Primary series. Complete with Teacher’s Manuals and Activity Packs, this writing curriculum is full of kid-friendly activities that will leave your youngsters asking for more!
If you’re considering WriteShop Primary as part of your homeschool curriculum for next year, find out what other parents are saying. As always, we would love to hear your feedback as well!
