Rime Magic

Is your child a struggling reader or just beginning reading? This strategy only takes 5 minutes every day, and it’s been the fastest, best way to teach phonics and letter recognition I’ve encountered in teaching.

Rime Magic helps kids practice “chunking” letters together by making sounds (rimes) that often come up in words. They learn to recognize parts or patterns, and then building words on their own becomes much easier. It’s like stacking bricks together to make a building from the foundation up.

Below, you can see the alphabet and the rime cards I use with my niece, Esther, who is in 1st grade.

The five vowels with their short vowel sound — A, E, I, O, U.

Ex. “A is for apple.”

Here are some cards. I’ve pulled out the sounds and endings that Esther was stumbling over the most. Distinguishing between the “i” and “e” sound, while navigating the tricky endings that sound similar as well. You’ll see in the video below that we review the difference in how our mouths and throats feel when we say these short “i” and “e.”

This lesson was recorded by Esther’s ten year old brother (now I know what I look like from a kid’s view haha!) Although this is a rough angle, I hope that you can grasp the process. We quickly review that alphabet sounds before the rime flash cards. I grouped the cards by letter, but normally I mix them up or focus on specific ones Esther needs. I also talked more than I always need to. Ideally, Esther does all the talking. My goal here was to model a lesson when first introducing Magic Rimes.

You’ll want to push the children to read quickly and trust they’ll catch up with the pace eventually. This can feel counterintuitive, but going slower and expecting perfection is begrudging and boring for kids. And it defeats the purpose of teaching kids to quickly recognize rimes.

Esther is ready to practice new affix endings, such as “s,” “-ed,” “-ing.” I’ll use my fingers with the rime cards to represent these endings. You can see more videos here for examples: Magic Rime videos. Overtime, you can build complex words together.

Here is the website to learn more, called Rime Magic.

Incorporating Rime Magic into a homeschool reading lesson…

Esther is homeschooled, and we use Rime Magic at the beginning of her daily reading lessons. Her reading schedule looks like this:

5 min - Rime Magic

15 min - Independent reading/ Read-to-self

15 min - Daily reading lesson from the Good & the Beautiful Curriculum

I’d be curious to hear what you think of Magic Rimes! Or what works for you at home.