Halloween Rhyming I Have...Who Has Game

While the cochlear implant and other advances in hearing technology have made learning to read using a sound-based approach more achievable, both phonological and phonemic awareness can be very challenging for students with hearing loss, even with amplification.  That said, it isn't the same for these students as students with normal hearing and shouldn't be treated that way.  This blog post is not to get into the nitty gritty of teaching reading and literacy to Deaf and Hard of Hearing students.  I do, however, want to highlight one of the skills that I observe to be challenging pretty consistently for most of my students...and that is rhyming.  I've noticed some correlations over the years, none of which should surprise anyone.  My students that are reading on grade level are typically better at rhyming.  My students that have age-appropriate (or pretty close) speech articulation skills are also better at rhyming.  These students are the ones that can generate rhyming words regardless of spelling patterns (ex. hairy/scary, rolled/cold).  Another pattern I have noted is that many of my students, when asked to generate a rhyme to a target word, will change the end of the word instead of the beginning (ex. cat/car/cab).  For my students that are really struggling with rhyme, they more often name a semantically-related word (ex. cat/dog).  I do my best to help them visually see rhyme, using word families (ex. sat/cat/hat/mat), but to "hear" rhyme you need really good access.  My students with cochlear implants and those with unilateral loss definitely fair better than my students with bilateral hearing aids.  However, many of my students with early access to sound through cochlear implants struggle in this area.

This Halloween-themed "I Have...Who Has" game using rhyming words is a fun way to target and practice rhyming.  It is available for free download on Teachers Pay Teachers.  It is also great for working on auditory skill development, listening to both adult and peer spoken English.  This is a particularly challenging game for targeting listening skills because the targets are single words without context or a closed set, in essence open set identification.  When we play this game in therapy, once a card is read aloud it is laid down on the table.  This allows everyone to see the the written word and use the spelling patterns to help find the rhyming word.  Some of the words in this game are also great for a quick vocabulary lesson (handy, thud, grave, motion, potion, gloom, cones, goon).