I am all about rhyming these days as I try to help my PreK class get this skill down before the school year is done. Rhyming is a foundational literacy skill that our students need for a bunch of reasons. When you play with rhymes, you are playing with sounds and learning to recognize sound patterns. Rhyming taps into many skills like listening, distinguishing specific sounds (phonemes), and breaking a word into syllables. For these reasons, we need to make space and time for lots of rhyming activities like using these rhyming blocks in our classrooms. Finding and buying new classroom materials gets expensive, so I decided I’d show you how to make these rhyming blocks using your own Duplo, tape, and scissors and my inexpensive printable, which you can buy and download below. Great materials don’t have to cost a bunch!
Gather your materials. You will need my printable, some Duplo, tape, and scissors. That’s it. * After downloading the printable, make sure that you use the default setting for scale when you print. This will result in the squares fitting Duplo perfectly.
As you can see, my printable includes images and words.
You can choose to tape both on or just one. Whatever level your students are at, follow their lead. For my PreK class, I am just doing the images.
Cut out.
Time to tape. I thought this would take FOREVER, but I did all the blocks you see here in 12 minutes, which was good because I had to pick my 5th grader up from school.
If your students need a little scaffold, you can put all the rhyming words on the same color blocks. This will be a hint as they learn to recognize rhymes.
I didn’t think my students need that, so I taped the images on random colors of Duplo.
How To Play With Rhyming Blocks
With beginners, I like to have two sets of rhyming words. Start with two blocks on the base plate. Show your students a block and say it and the other two, asking them which rhymes. Star/bug… star/car, which sounds the same? Yes, Star and car rhyme the have the same last sound! Keep going.
As children become more proficient at rhyming, offer less guidance and more blocks.
Good rhymers can build on their own!
Download all 60 rhyming block cards here for $2.49
More Rhyming Resources
Find more rhyming ideas to use in your classroom or homeschool here.
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