Onset Rime is just the breaking up of the first sound or phoneme in the word from the rest of the word.
This skill leads right into the phonemic awareness skills, which we already talked about in a bunch of earlier posts.
Just like with identifying rhyming words, this skill set directly correlates with successful work with word families.
In relation to phonemic awareness, teaching onset-rime will help students with blending and segmenting the individual phonemes in words, once the student progresses to that skill set.
Linking the phonemes and groups of phonemes to manipulatives helps students to make the concept more concrete.
For example, take a picture of a frog, and cut the picture into 1 small and 1 large piece. Make sure to have the small piece be on the left so that when moving the pieces you’ll move from left to right, like when we are reading.
Don’t you love how we can sneak in little things like that to reinforce all the other skills that we don’t necessarily have time to reinforce all the time.
Say /f/ and slide the small piece forward, then /rog/ and slide the larger piece to make the picture. You may need to model it several times for the student to understand what you want them to do. Continue with other pictures, you modeling with the student practicing until you feel like the student is ready to try one on their own.
That skill practice lends itself perfectly to progress monitoring onset rime.
Count the times they attempted the skill independently and how many times they were correct and you have a graphable data point for the week. Remember, progress monitoring doesn’t have to be a big showy assessment, it can be small data checks that the student doesn’t even know are assessments. I’ve always felt like these small assessments were more accurate than larger tests which caused so much anxiety and frustration for students who were already struggling.
Any of the phonological awareness skills, including onset rime, can be assessed in quick little data checks. When I first started working on assessing goals for response to intervention, I thought that the data points had to come from specific assessments which took up extra time. Eventually I realized that if I integrate the data checks into the flow of the lessons, I can much more easily get the information I need without wasting time on another assessment. I don’t know about you, but I think kids are being assessed way too much formally. That is why I try really hard to find sneaky ways to get my data without adding more assessments!
If you are looking for more information on progress monitoring or data collection, check out my 5 Step Guide to Getting Started with Progress Monitoring. It won’t disappoint!
If you DM me on Instagram, I’d love to talk about ways that you can integrate onset rime data checks into your small groups so that you can gather your information and keep right on teaching. I think we all could use more time in the day, so finding sneaky ways to take back our time from assessments is important to me!