June 30, 2026
Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons
The Hierarchy of Phonological Awareness Skills
Sometimes, many times actually, I find myself wearing a detective hat when working with my little friends. In one particular case I asked myself the question, “Why is my little friend not understanding rhyming?”
I used my knowledge of phonological awareness (the ability to recognize and manipulate the sounds of spoken language) to see where the breakdown was happening. In Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons the first few chapters are devoted to phonological awareness skills. These skills ultimately help a child learn to decode words. The skills include looking at a symbol and saying the sound, then saying the sound slowly to blend sounds together in a word. This helps a child learn a word that consists of individual sounds.
I asked my little friend to repeat compound words first: “Rain-” *pause* “-bow” and waited. He repeated “rainbow” with no difficulty. I included other compound words like “football” and “motorboat“. He repeated them back with ease, demonstrating an understanding of whole words and how they can be blended together.
Next I tried breaking a word into parts “p-” *pause* “-ot” for the word “pot”. This is where the breakdown happened. He did not understand the concept of word endings. I had my starting place. To build his understanding, my favorite strategy is the use of word wheels. He now has quite the collection of different endings (-at, -ap, -am, -op, -ay, etc.). Over a couple of months of practicing the word wheels, he now happily rhymes to his heart’s content!
Enjoy making rhyming fun once your child understands word families with Madlibs or a rhyming song like Down By the Bay. Happy rhyming!