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Onset Rime Activities - Reading Game
Onset-Rime Activities offers a fun, structured way to teach one of the most powerful yet often-overlooked pre-reading skills: onset and rime awareness. Developed by Annemarie Roux for Yellow Tree Reading Academy, this resource helps children break words into two meaningful parts—the onset (initial sound) and the rime (vowel and following sounds)—a crucial step in learning to decode and spell words fluently.
Grounded in the Science of Reading, these activities strengthen phonological awareness, helping learners recognise sound patterns, word families, and spelling structures. The reading game progresses from simple to more complex word patterns, giving struggling readers and early learners the confidence and cognitive framework to recognise patterns like cat, hat, and bat quickly and automatically.
Perfect for classrooms, reading intervention, and home learning, Onset-Rime Activities provides hands-on, engaging ways to help children hear, see, and play with the building blocks of language.
- Builds Early Decoding Skills – Helps children segment and blend words efficiently, strengthening reading fluency and spelling.
- Supports Phonological Awareness Development – Reinforces understanding of sound structures and patterns in spoken and written language.
- Makes Phonics More Accessible – Introduces larger “sound chunks” (rimes) before moving to individual phonemes, reducing cognitive load for struggling readers.
- Improves Working Memory and Sound Processing – Teaches students to manipulate onset and rime pairs, enhancing memory and attention.
- Encourages Pattern Recognition – Strengthens learners’ ability to identify word families and transfer knowledge to new, unfamiliar words.
- Research-Based and Classroom-Tested – Designed according to the developmental sequence of phonological awareness and the Science of Reading framework.
