Phonics Worksheets

Rhyme is usually the first phonics skill a child can show you without reading a letter. Say cat, hat and drum, ask which one sounds different, and a four year old will often point at the drum before they can tell you why. That listening comes before blending, before word families and before spelling patterns, which is why this section opens with rhyming worksheets.

The collection has five activity types, each printed six times with a different pair of rhymes. Picture Rhyme Match asks for a pencil line from cat to hat and from fox to box. Circle the Word That Does Not Rhyme sets a third picture beside each pair, always a drum or a sun in the English set. Build the Word Family puts two pictures in a box with a space to write the ending they share. Cut and Paste Rhyming Pairs turns the same words into four cards, and Kindergarten Rhyme Practice adds a grey word to trace before the match.

Every PDF is two pages. The first is the worksheet and the second repeats it with the answers filled in, so a parent or an older sibling can check the work.

How do you teach rhyming to a preschooler?

Start out loud, with no paper at all. Say two words slowly, stretch the ending a little, and ask whether they sound the same at the end. Once a child can answer that for spoken pairs, the picture match sheets are the next step, because the drawings give them the words without any reading.

The pairs range from three-letter words like cat, fox and log to pairs whose spelling differs, such as bear and chair or light and kite. Say those last ones out loud together, because they show a child that a rhyme lives in the sound before it lives in the letters.

Children who are ready for letter shapes can move on to letter tracing, where each capital comes with a picture to name. Printer settings and paper choices are on the how to print page.