Using the theme of Easter, kids have been able to practice some basic math, explore movement and enhance big muscle development, and enjoy an art activity and tradition this week in just minutes a day. Here’s another quick and easy idea but one of critical importance for learning to read. Those of you who read regularly can guess, already. Rhyming. Why is it so very important? Rhyming is an activity that is based on the skills of dividing words into their sound parts and then recombining them to make new words, something we do when we’re reading. A divide and conquer strategy. Easter has lots of great words for word families: bunny rhymes with funny, money, honey, and sunny. What else? Hop sounds like drop, stop, shop, top, mop, pop, bop …. Try chick, blue, red, green, pink, white, black, etc. Notice that it’s hard to think of ones for purple, orange and egg. One is a fun number to rhyme. Chocolate is a hard word to rhyme, so maybe we’ll just eat it instead. Oops, I’ll have to sign off, my mouth is full of chocolate. MMmmm.
