Onset Rime Activities for the Word Family "at"
Download At Word Family for Clicker 5 (zip file, 9.3 MB)
Why Onset Rime?
Onset Rime has been shown to be one of the most effective ways of improving phonological awareness (Adams, 1990). In addition, once children grasp that one word can be used to generate other words this often helps both their reading and writing skills.
The onset rime activities in this set are all around the word family “at”. Obviously, similar activities need to be done with other word families in order for students to learn to generalise this skill, and to start using the rimes to make words.
What’s in the pack?
Included in the pack are two stories. One bat, two cats, three hats is designed as a simple, repetitive book to help beginning readers to see how changing just the beginning letter of a word produces a change of meaning.
Two, three and four letter choice are interactive activities designing to allow the student to make words themselves – it is recommended you start with two letter choices, and then move to three and then four. As each grid opens the student is asked to spell a word via a recorded cue. Some students may need one to one assistance with this to begin with. The grid sets do not provide feedback on whether the student has answered correctly but instead rely on the student listening to the word they produce in Clicker Writer and evaluating themselves about whether or not this is correct. Each of these grid sets make use of two great features of Clicker 5 – the grids are presented in random order so the student doesn`t “learn” the order of the responses, and each grid also uses forced order selection – the student must choose an onset, then a rime, and then choose to go forward or back to the menu grid.
One bat, two cats, three hats with word popups allows the student to write their own version of this book. If you have access to a microphone you can click on the microphone button to record your own speech for this book.
At word bank is a much harder activity which is designed to be used with a teacher or tutor calling out words that they would like the student to spell. The student needs to find the appropriate onset for the required word and then follow it up with the appropriate rime.
And finally, The Cat is an example of the sort of book a student could produce using this word family.
This set of activities is not a definitive list of onset rime activities for all word families, or even for this one word family – it is merely a starting point to give you ideas.
We hope these are helpful to you.
Reference
- Adams, M.J. (1990) Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print. Centre for the Study of Reading, Urbana, Illinois.