Free: Dental Health Month Rhyming Matchups

How do you teach rhyming to your pre-schoolers? Rhyming is an important pre-literacy skill and is part of the foundation that future reading skills are built on. But, teaching rhyming doesn’t have to be complicated!

My favorite ways to work on rhyming is to enjoy lots and lots of rhyming songs and stories together! Oral language activities and games are the best ways to learn rhyming because they’re a natural part of the way children process language.

Once the children have had plenty of experience hearing rhyming words in songs and stories, and I know that they’ve developed an ear for it, I introduce them to some hands on activities such as sorting and matching rhyming pictures and objects.

I created this rhyming printable to go with our Dental Health, Human Body, and All About Me themes.

A printable like this is suitable for children who have already been introduced to the concept of rhyming and can identify rhymes in songs and stories.

This rhyming printable is great as an individual activity or a group activity. To play:

Line up the toothbrush mats and name the picture on the tooth.
Place the individual tooth cards in a stack.
Pick up a tooth card and name the picture.
Look for the rhyming toothbrush mat and place the tooth card on it.

I have used mostly easy CVC words for these cards so that the rhymes are simple. This printable includes 4 rhyming pairs for each short vowel.

Other ways to use these cards:

If you have spellers in your class, use the tooth cards with magnetic letters or a movable alphabet to spell the CVC words
Print two copies of the tooth cards to make a simple matching activity
Sort the tooth cards by middle vowel
Use magnetic letters to identify the initial sounds on the toothbrush mats