Rima, Rima, Rimador...

Rhyming...if you are a PK/K teacher, that very word could strike terror in your soul!  You have probably been working on rhyming all year and now you are administering assessments on your little ones to see if they can generate rhyming words and identify rhyming pairs. 

I am currently preparing a training for a group of PK/K bilingual teachers on how to teach rhyming in Spanish.  EL Saber has a new resource available for teachers called Palabrimas.  The resource is a series of Spanish rhyming activities that give students the opportunity to practice their rhyming skills to become successful readers. 

While I have always known that rhyming was an important skill for literacy, I really didn't know why.  I could see the need for blending syllables...this helps you read words.  I could see the need for segmenting syllables...this helps you write words.  But rhyming?  Besides being fun, why is it considered so foundational, especially for Spanish-speakers and readers who do not rely on word families for decoding?

Well, after spending several hours searching the research journal databases, I found some really good articles and came up with these general recommendations from their studies on Spanish-speaking bilingual learners and rhyming instruction:

·      Developing the skill of rhyming in both languages simultaneously can help students acquire phonological awareness more quickly due to cross-linguistic transfer.

Dickinson, D., McCabe, A., Clark-Chiarelli, N., & Wolf, A. (2004).

·    Spanish-speaking children may require more exposure than their English-speaking peers to acquire rhyming skills.

Culatta, B., Reese, M., & Setzer, L.  (2006). 

·      Be careful when using visual images because of ELLs’ tendency to emphasize meaning over sound.

Moreira, S. & Hamilton, M.  (2006).

·      Target one rhyme per activity (initially) and provide multiple examples of the targeted rhyming words.  Nonsense words may be included but students must understand their purpose.

Culatta, B., Reese, M., & Setzer, L.  (2006). 

·      While teaching rhyme in Spanish is constrained by the limited number of rhyming word pairs available, teachers may compensate by repeatedly using the same word pairs in a large array of meaningful activities.

Culatta, B., Reese, M., & Setzer, L.  (2006). 

·      Anchor students’ understanding of the words rhyme/rima and rhyming words/palabras que riman.  Prior to reading subsequent stories, check for an understanding of what rhyming is and remind the children to listen for words that rhyme.

Adams, M., Foorman, B., Lundberg, I., & Beeler, T. (1998). 

·      Highlight the ending using intonation and stress.  While reading rhyme stories aloud, exaggerate the meter and rhyme to encourage active listening and anticipation among the children.

Culatta, B., Reese, M., & Setzer, L.  (2006). 

In addition to all of these Palabrimas resources, I have found and created a lot of other rhyming activities/games as well as located A LOT of Spanish rhyming books.  I will post more next week!  Until then...¡Hasta mañana, iguana!