The Rhyming Rabbit

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Enjoy all the stories from Julia Donaldson and Lydia Monks: Sharing a Shell, The Princess and the Wizard, The Rhyming Rabbit, The Singing Mermaid, Sugarlump and the Unicorn, Princess Mirror-Belle and the Dragon Pox, What the Ladybird Heard, What the Ladybird Heard Next and What the Ladybird Heard on Holiday. In the burrow he meets a worm and a mole but they too don’t appreciate his rhymes. It’s not until he digs his way out of the earth and into a field where he meets a friendly sheep that he finally finds a friend who likes rhymes as much as he does. The Rhyming Rabbit and the sheep spend the whole night and the next day making up new rhymes together. When he has to leave, the Rhyming Rabbit vows to return again the next day to see his new friend. Before Malcolm and I had our three sons we used to go busking together and I would write special songs for each country; the best one was in Italian about pasta.

I also continued to write “grown-up” songs and perform them in folk clubs and on the radio, and have recently released two CDs of these songs. Did you know that the ability to rhyme can be an early predictor of whether or not a child can read? Whether or not they can rhyme.

The Rhyming Rabbit loves to make up entertaining poems, inspired by everything he sees, but the other rabbits don’t appreciate his talent for rhyme. Sad and lonely, the Rhyming Rabbit sets off one starry night all on his own – will he ever find someone to share his poems with? Rhyming Books Dr. Seuss books are the perfect resource for this strategy. There are a plethora of other rhyming books as well, but none that have been quite as successful as resonating through the ages. I really liked this book due to the clever rhyming and captivating illustrations which make engagement with the book easy for young children.

Rhyme Battles For this you’ll need to set a timer for say, 15 seconds. Give your child a word and have them tell you as many words as they can think of that rhyme with that word. You will record them on a whiteboard. Then you will trade of and you will choose a diferent word and do the same. The winner is the person who thought up the most rhymes.

I grew up in a tall Victorian London house with my parents, grandmother, aunt, uncle, younger sister Mary and cat Geoffrey (who was really a prince in disguise. Mary and I would argue about which of us would marry him). To introduce this strategy, I begin with the book, The Rhyming Rabbit. This is a story about a lonely rabbit with an affinity for creating poems. None of the other animals in the forest appreciate his rhymes, until one night he meets a friendly sheep who loves to rhyme too. His books are in fact, partially the inspiration behind this next reading strategy that does not typically appear on classroom walls. As you read these books with your child (or have them read them to you), be sure to take note of and discuss the rhyming words in the book and how they are useful in decoding unknown words. However, his books aren’t just fun to read. They are also extremely important as a beginning reading resource as they contain something incredibly helpful for young readers.

My real breakthrough was THE GRUFFALO, again illustrated by Axel. We work separately - he’s in London and I’m in Glasgow - but he sends me letters with lovely funny pictures on the envelopes. This is another strategy I created for my students when I saw a need for it. I noticed students doing really well using beginning sounds as clues and even looking for chunks. This is because rhyming essentially teaches children how language works. Specifically, it introduces them to the rhythm of language and helps them to notice the patterns sounds make in words.However, because Chunky Monkey lead them to look for word chunks throughout the words, they often ignored the simplest and most obvious possibility – making the connection with the end of the word and using a rhyme.