Rhymes and Word Games Before Writing: What Phonological Awareness Is
Hiroki Obara · DeveloperBrainDojo KidsHow-To
England’s Department for Education publishes Development Matters, the non-statutory curriculum guidance for the early years foundation stage. It was last updated in September 2023. It says that 3 and 4-year-olds will be learning to “develop their phonological awareness, so that they can”:
- spot and suggest rhymes
- count or clap syllables in a word
- recognise words with the same initial sound, such as money and mother
None of these needs a letter. They are about the sounds of spoken words, and that is what phonological awareness means: noticing the sound of a word apart from its meaning, and being able to work with it.
The examples the guidance gives are small changes to things children already sing. Change a word in a song so that it still rhymes, as in “Twinkle, twinkle yellow car.” Put a child’s name into a nursery rhyme: “Hey diddle diddle, the cat and fiddle, the cow jumped over Haroon.” Stop before the last word of a familiar line and let the children fill it in.
For children in reception, the guidance lists “listen carefully to rhymes and songs, paying attention to how they sound” and “learn rhymes, poems and songs.” It suggests saying out loud what you notice, for example that “a frog on a log” sounds a bit the same at the end, and adds: “Encourage children to have fun with rhyme, even if their suggestions don’t make complete sense.”
Rhyme and reading
A 1983 paper in Nature by Lynette Bradley and Peter Bryant Categorizing sounds and learning to read: a causal connection, starts from an observation: children who are behind in reading are “strikingly insensitive to rhyme and alliteration,” and are at a disadvantage when sorting words by common sounds even compared with younger children who read no better than they do.
Sorting words by sound means paying attention to the sounds inside them, and so does learning to use the alphabet in reading and spelling. From this the authors put forward the hypothesis that “the experiences which a child has with rhyme before he goes to school might have a considerable effect on his success later on in learning to read and to write,” and reported a large-scale project that supported it.
The same question in Japanese
Japanese children have their own word game for this: shiritori. One person says a word, and the next must say a word that begins with the last sound of that word. The unit of sound is different from English. As Noboru Takahashi notes in the paper below, research in English-speaking countries works with phonemes, or with onset and rime, while in Japanese the unit is the syllable or the mora, the beat Japanese is counted in. How morae are counted is in Counting Japanese Sounds.
Takahashi ran three experiments with kindergarten children in Osaka and published them in 1997 in the Japanese Journal of Developmental Psychology (the paper is in Japanese, with an English abstract). He found that playing shiritori without help takes two abilities: isolating the last syllable of a word, and retrieving words that begin with a given syllable. Shiritori scores were more closely tied to a test of saying many words that start with one sound than to a test of naming many animals or fruits. The abstract’s conclusion is that this is not a matter of a large vocabulary: children need to reorganize their mental lexicon so that words can be looked up by sound.
The third experiment found close links among shiritori, reading kana and phonological awareness. It also showed that children who could not yet play alone could take part with adults’ help. The help came in three steps: ask what the last sound of the word is, then tell the child the last sound, then give a hint about a target word, such as the group it belongs to or what it looks like. Takahashi’s interpretation is that children first join word play from the edge, their phonological awareness grows there, and that helps them learn to read kana. He also points out that all three experiments compared children at one point in time, and that a simple one-way relation, word play raising phonological awareness, should not be assumed, since the game itself already needs some.
A 2024 study by Shun Tanaka and colleagues (in Japanese) played shiritori with 189 children aged 3 to 6 at a Japanese nursery and counted three exchanges as a pass. One of 29 three-year-olds passed, 24 of 54 four-year-olds, 45 of 58 five-year-olds and 45 of 48 six-year-olds.
What the sources give you to work with
Sound before letters. Every item in the Development Matters list can be played with no writing at all.
Rhyme. Change a word in a song, put a name into a rhyme, leave the last word of a line for the child. These are the guidance’s own examples.
Syllables. Clapping once for each syllable in a name or a word is the second item on the list.
First sounds. The guidance’s example pair is money and mother. In the Japanese study, finding many words that start with one sound was the skill most closely tied to playing shiritori.
Help in steps. When a child gets stuck, Takahashi’s three steps go from a question, to the answer’s first sound, to a hint about the word itself.
Nonsense is fine. The guidance says to encourage fun with rhyme “even if their suggestions don’t make complete sense.”
When children start forming letters is covered in When Do Kids Start Writing Letters?
Letter and word courses in BrainDojo Kids
BrainDojo Kids is an iPhone and iPad app I make for ages 3 to 6, where children write on the screen with a finger or a pen to practice letters and numbers.
The letter courses go in four steps: Trace, Copy, Write and Test. First Alphabet, Lowercase Letters and English Words are available with the app set to English. A parent can also add words the child likes, family names included, and the app turns them into a tracing course; every stage of that course is free.
The three daily games in Today’s Training and the four Recommended games are free each day, and every other game can be tried once. In the parent settings there is a daily time limit, on by default at 10 minutes. There are no ads and no account to create. The app is free to start, and a Premium subscription (monthly or yearly) opens all courses and games. The first session is covered in Getting Started with BrainDojo Kids.
