New Rhyming Cards on the Language Shelves

We haven't been doing regular school for a couple of weeks through the holidays but that certainly didn't stop DJ from learning. He actually asked me one day, "Mommy, are you my teacher?" It's clear that he's becoming more and more aware that we're not just playing.

The break also didn't stop me from looking for resources and I found these amazing Rhyming Cards on the Measured Mom's website. Typically when I find ideas like this I tend to re-create them to either remove the words or type them in cursive. But these cards are so adorable and there are so many of them, I never could have made them myself so well.

I had a little time to myself just after Christmas so I took the chance to prepare these cards which means: print, cut, laminate and cut again. There are 48 cards, which is A LOT so I separated them into two piles, one that I'm sure DJ would recognize all of the pictures and a second where the pictures are new to DJ or where we use a different name for them. That left me with 24 cards. I've set the second pile aside for now.

I wasn't thinking very clearly when I decided to put the new cards out on the shelf. The moment DJ entered the room, he noticed the new change right away and started begging me to show them to him. I was trying to put him off when he says, "but Mommy, you HAVE to teach me!" Hah. So much for my winter break!



The Measured Mom intended for these cards to be used with clothespins, which is a great option to add a finger dexterity aspect, but I didn't have clothespins so I have DJ a dry erase marker. At first I told him to circle the correct answer, which he quickly morphed into coloring in the correct answer and then later added coloring both the question and the answer! He loves coloring so this was a lot of fun for him and it really extended the amount of time he looked at each card, comparing the words.


He didn't do all 24 but rather did about 6 or so at a time in little bursts over a few days. You can see from the picture that he also wasn't always right. He has star-car, can-fan and frog-dog correct; but jeep-chick just doesn't make sense...to us!

For some reason, despite my prompting, he was adamant that jeep-chick was right. He was equally as certain that cook-hill was a rhyme. Hmm... Montessori does discourage correcting a child, at least not saying they're outright wrong. So I prompted a bit, are you sure? Jeep ends in "eep," Chick ends in "ick." Does that rhyme? But no matter what I said, he was insistent. So I let him color it. He has LOTS of time to learn.


And of course, with the dry erase marker, he also gets the practical life skill of cleaning up when he's done. He loves these cards. They have been a huge win for us. (Thank you Measured Mom!)

Oh, and did you see the matchbox car in that last photo? This boy is NEVER far from a toy car. Lol!