Rhyming

by Cindy R. Williams

Are you a poet? or maybe interested in writing a children's book using rhymes?

Here's a great tool for you.

Scholastic's RHYMING DICTIONARY. I purchased a copy from my son's elementary school book fair years ago. It's wonderful. I just checked, and it's available on Amazon.com.

Words in the book are alphabetized by the beginning vowel of the rhyming sound. A large part of the book is divided into six sections, one each for A, E, I O, U, and even Y.

You probably already know that the word "orange" doesn't have a rhyme, but, did you know that "pint" doesn't rhyme with anything either?

When I do elementary school presentations with my children's picture book, a big part of the presentation is about encouraging the children to write their own stories. We practice finding rhymes to go with their names. Not just any word, but an adjective that could be used in a story, such as "Fancy Nancy,"  "Silly Billy," or "Sticky Vicky".

With many of the names being used today, it soon becomes obvious that their aren't any "real" word adjuctive rhymes that would work. So . . . we do the next best thing, and have a quick chat about the king of making up writing words, Theodore Suess Geisel, better known as . . .Dr. Suess, Now there's a whole new world of creativity. The children love it. It's a blast to think outside the box and create funny rhymes.  We get rhymes like; "Cole Shmowl", "Claudia Dottia", "Tara Mon Fraira".

We play the "Alphabet Rhyming Game". If the first letter of the name or word is a consonant, drop it and insert letters of the alphabet until you come up with either a real word that works, or a fun word you have now created.  A good example of how it works is to use the word "Cat". Drop the "c" and start inserting the alphabet. You already have "at", then "bat", "cat" your original word, then "dat" (not a real word, but if you're Dr. Suess, the skies the limit, which means you can create your own words too right? And on it goes until you arrive at "zat".

With these new tools in your word tool belt, you now have rhymes for all times. (Yeah, I meant to do that, corny, but point taken right?)