Rhyme-less Rita

I want to tell you about Rita.   Rita was a student I worked with MANY years ago (more than I can believe!).     I was a new teacher and knew almost nothing about dyslexia.  I had heard of it, but got no training on it in my credentialing classes to become a special education teacher (education specialist).  Can you believe that?!   Poor Rita.  She couldn’t rhyme, blend, or segment in kindergarten.  And I didn’t really know what to do about it except to practice MORE rhyming, blending, and segmenting.  For a few years, we kept at it, while also working on sight words and other reading skills.     Rita was able to stay at grade-level in her reading but couldn’t rhyme, blend, or segment much at all.  (Despite all of the practice we had been doing!)   I’m a researcher by nature.  I love to read and research any topic I’m interested in, and especially ones around problems I’m trying to solve for myself, my family, or my students!   So I read and read and realized I needed to do something more fundamental than the rhyming, blending, and segmenting that I had been doing!   Eventually, we found success and Rita was able to segment and blend and read unknown words, although rhyming was never her strong suit!  She became a strong reader who could figure out some rhymes.   The first things that helped a little was just an overall increase in Rita’s exposure to rhyming.  We played rhyming games, practiced rhyming, books, poems, songs, videos.  This was the stuff I did early on that seemed to help some, but not nearly enough.   Eventually, I used a systematic phonemic awareness instruction.  It included a lot of specific segmenting and blending practice.  For more on how that works, check out the episode/blog on Phonemic Awareness and Dyslexia.   Takeaway: Rhyming isn’t easy and isn’t automatic for some kids.  They need systematic interventions.   If you want to learn how to teach your own child with dyslexia, email me at [email protected]