Kindergarten RTI: Rhyming and Identifying Initial and Medial Phonemes

Assessments are done and I've started working with my students now. I have so much to write about but so little time, so I thought I'd share a little snippet from my kindergarten groups. I'm working with kindergartener on the alphabetic principal and phonological awareness at this point in the year. Working with these students inspired me to add a little to my Phonemic Awareness Intervention Pack. I've added several pages of rhyming activities,  more initial phoneme cards, and a medial phonemes activity. Right now we are working on rhyming and identifying the initial phonemes in words. Those are two skills that we want our kindergarteners to start the year off having.

Rhyme It: 
There are several rhyme cards with this activity. Choose a bigger rectangular card to set on top (here, the picture of the pail is shown.) There will be three picture cards that rhyme with that word.

How to use this activity: 
Ahead of time, have the three cards the rhyme, plus three others that do not rhyme, ready to go. Place the rectangle card on the board. With your small group gathered around, say the word. For example, the picture shown in this picture above is pail. Then choose a card from your stack of 6. Say the word that matches the picture. Say the word pail again. Ask students to give a thumbs up if it rhymes and a thumbs down if it doesn't. Choose one student to place the card on the correct square. The blank squares represent words that rhyme and the x squares are for words that do not rhyme. Give all students in your group the chance to be the one who places the card on the mat.
Make sure everyone is interacting by:
1. Having them saying the words with you.
2. Whispering the words a second time in their whisper phones.
3. Giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to show if they think the picture card rhymes with the main word.
After all cards are placed on the board, say all the rhyming words together to reinforce the rhyme.

Initial Sound Sort 

I also added picture cards to the initial sound sort. For this activity, students will decide if the picture card starts with the same phoneme as the rectangle picture card that the teacher placed on the board. For example, I put the butterfly card on the board. I would get the initial b sound cards out ahead of time and mix in some other initial sounds. Just as with the other activity, I would have students say the word that matches the picture and gives a thumbs up or down if they think it has the same initial sound as butterfly.  

Medial Sounds:

I also added an activity for medial phonemes. With this activity, place the rectangular card on the board. This card has a vowel  (your medial sound) with a picture to remind students of the sound. There are 12 cards for each vowel. To do this activity, take the 12 picture cards for that vowel and mix in some cards that do not have that same vowel sound. Students will choose a card and say the word that matches the picture. As a group, stretch out this word. You can stretch using slinkies or extend your arm and slide through the word. Next, point to the rectangle card and review the sound /aaaaa/. Ask students to give you thumbs up if the picture card has the /a/ sound in it. If it does, place the card on the blank box. If it doesn't, then place it on the square with the x. 

To see the MANY other activities in this Phonemic Awareness Pack, click here. 

You can find this pack on TPT here.