Rhyming Words for Kindergarten – Free Printable
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Get 70 lists of rhyming words for Kindergarten on one free printable page! Because each list contains 5-9 words, there are over 400 words in total to use as examples of words that rhyme!
Why We Love It
Teaching rhyme to students is important, but that doesn’t mean it has to be complicated!
Using a rhyming words list helps to support literacy development, especially in the early stages of reading instruction.
We created a comprehensive printable list of rhyming words for kindergarten, where rhyme is explicitly included as part of the Common Core Standards.
This list contains 70 word families and over 400+ rhyming words. It easily fits on one page and makes oral practice with rhyming words a breeze!
The words include tons of phonics skills, including CVC, words with digraphs and blends, as well as words with diphthongs and r-controlled vowel sounds.
But the list is intended for oral practice, so kids don’t need to have been taught any explicit phonics concepts to work with the words!
👉 For lists of words organized by phonics skills, visit our roundup with links to over 50+ Word Lists for Phonics Skills.
👉 More rhyming fun: Get 5 FREE no-prep rhyming words worksheets!
Teaching Tips & Info
This rhyming word list can be used in a variety of ways. We designed it for the teacher in mind, focusing on oral-only activities to promote students’ phonological awareness skills.
👂🏻 Phonological Awareness
Rhyming is a key component of phonological awareness, which is essential for reading and spelling.
This list of rhyming words can be used to help children recognize and produce rhyme patterns, which strengthens their ability to hear and manipulate sounds in words.
👨👩👧👧 Spelling and Word Families
Rhyming word lists can introduce students to word families (e.g., bill, hill, still).
Kids begin to hear connections between words and understand how substituting just one phoneme changes the whole word.
🔊 Sound Discrimination
For children struggling with hearing or differentiating sounds, a rhyming word list can help them practice identifying differences and similarities in sound patterns.
They might be asked to pick out which words rhyme and which don’t.
💬 Language Development
Rhyming words help with vocabulary building, as children start to recognize word families and patterns in words.
Use this rhyming list to teach word relationships and expand a child’s word knowledge.
🧠 Memory Building Game
We love gamifying practice anytime we can! Rhyming words, by nature, are engaging and fun. So use the word list to strengthen a child’s memory with word repeating.
Start with saying two words, then have the student repeat (bell, shell). Then move to three words (bell, shell, tell), then move to four words (bell, shell, tell, well), and continue on.
This builds important memory skills and strengthens an awareness of rhyming words.
🏆 Challenge Students
Rhyme production is a harder skill than rhyme awareness. Use the list to challenge students with generating additional rhymes!
Say some of the words that rhyme, like “beg, leg, peg…” and see how many real or nonsense words kids can generate independently.
Related Resources
The CCSS 2.1A states that kids must “recognize and produce rhyming words” in kindergarten. Rhyme is a phonological awareness skill, so be sure to explore our other resources aimed at building other areas of phonological awareness.
☝️ Start with our 5 FREE Rhyming Worksheets to help students build and master this skill.
More helpful resources & informational articles:
- Phonemic Awareness Practice with Letters
- All About Phoneme Manipulation
- Blending Sounds Teaching Tips
- All About Using Sound Walls in the Classroom
- 30+ No-Prep Phoneme Substitution Worksheets
Download & Print
DOWNLOAD TERMS: All of our resources and printables are designed for personal use only in homes and classrooms. Each teacher must download his or her own copy. You may not: Save our files to a shared drive, reproduce our resources on the web, or make photocopies for anyone besides your own students. To share with others, please use the social share links provided or distribute the link to the blog post so others can download their own copies. Your support in this allows us to keep making free resources for everyone! Please see our Creative Credits page for information about the licensed clipart we use. If you have any questions or concerns regarding our terms, please email us. Thank you!
More Rhyming Freebies: 5 Rhyming Worksheets, Fox in Socks Picture Sort.