Learning and Teaching

The Science of Reading

Thus far in our learning abour phonemic awareness we have covered:

• syllables
• segmentation
• phoneme deletion
• phoneme substitution

In this addition, we will learn about onset and rime. The onset is the initial phonological unit of any word (eg: /c/ in cat) and the term rime refers to the string of letters that follow, usually a vowel and final consonants (e.g. /a/ /t/ in cat).  Thus, in this example we would ask for students to replace the initial phoneme to create words that all have the rime /a/ /t/. Examples would include: hat, mat, sat, bat, fat, pat, rat, tat, vat!

At home you could try with the rimes: ick, in, it and/or ip.

Depending on the year level of your child and what stage they are up to in their phonological knoweldge, you can introduce rimes that contain long vowels, such as: ight, ate, eat, and/or ow.