Rhyming Words Worksheets – Free Printables!
This post may contain affiliate links. As an Amazon affiliate, we earn from qualifying purchases.
Get 5 free printable Rhyming Words Worksheets for preschool and kindergarten students! Kids will practice identifying and generating rhyming words in fun and engaging ways.
What Is Rhyme?
Rhyme is the repetition of sounds at the end of words.
When words rhyme, they share the same ending sounds, starting from the vowel sound through all of the ending consonant sounds.
👉 For example: The words map, sap, lap, and chap rhyme because they share the same vowel and ending sounds.
Words that rhyme aren’t always spelled alike. Since there are many graphemes that spell the 44 phonemes in the English language, there are many pairs of words that rhyme but are not spelled alike.
👉 For example: Words like mail and whale rhyme because they have the same repeated sound at the end, even though the graphemes are different.
Rhyming is an important literacy skill for kids in preschool and kindergarten. It is considered a syllable-level skill, which is an earlier level phonological awareness skill.
For younger kids, exposure to rhyme occurs through songs, poems, stories, and targeted rhyme activities and games.
Teachers should start with explicit instruction and modeling, then give students lots of practice identifying and recognizing rhyme, and finally kids should learn to generate rhyme.
👉 Learn more about strategies to teach rhyme!
The worksheets we’re sharing here target identifying, recognizing, and generating rhyme. They’re great for kids in Pre-K and Kindergarten who haven’t learned to read yet, AND kids who can read!
Using the Worksheets with Students
We’re giving you 5 FREE worksheets to use with various groups of students, depending on their current skill level.
For all worksheets, we suggest having kids say the words out loud. Since rhyming is all about sounds, it’s important for them to hear the words, not just think them silently.
This auditory component turns the worksheets into a more interactive, multimodal activity!
Picture-Only Rhyming Worksheets
These two worksheets are great rhyming practice for kids who do not know their sounds or letters yet.
👉 Important: Be sure you review the pictures with kids so they can accurately find the word that rhymes. For example, kids need to know a picture shows ‘mice’ and not ‘rats.’
Cut & Match Rhyming Words
This worksheet challenges kids’ rhyming skills as they try to match 12 pairs of rhyming word pictures.
This engaging and multisensory worksheet reinforces phonological awareness skills (sound only) and keeps kids engaged in the skill, practicing scissor skills, too!
Match the Rhyming Words Worksheet
Here kids will look at a picture and draw a line to a rhyming picture.
Because only pictures are included, kids are forced to rely on sound only. Each picture includes only one match.
We suggest using a pencil at first. After kids have gone through all of the pictures and checked their work for rhyming pairs, then they can color with crayons.
Picture & Word Rhyming Worksheets
Because these worksheets include words, only use these with students who know their letters and sounds and can blend sounds to read words.
These worksheets bridge phonological awareness and phonics.
Read and Rhyme
Here kids will read a target word – then read three other words to find one that rhymes.
Kids color in the circle of the matching word. At the end, kids should read the matches aloud, checking to make sure they rhyme.
Rhyming Mazes
Kids will decode a whole bunch of words in the -at and -ip word families as they work their way from start to finish. We’ve added real and nonsense words to really give kids a decoding challenge!
This worksheet makes children attend to the patterns in words, seeing and hearing the phoneme-grapheme connections.
Once completed, kids should read all words in the path, checking to make sure they sound alike while building fluency.
Read, Rhyme, Write Worksheet
The National Reading Panel recommends having students practice generating words that rhyme.
With this worksheet, kids must read a word, produce and spell a rhyming word, and draw a picture to represent the word.
This is the most difficult of all the worksheets because the children have to come up with the words themselves.
And because they need to draw a picture, a nonsense word cannot be an option. Producing a rhyme is a much harder skill than simply recognizing a rhyme.
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!
Cut & Match Rhyming Words
Match the Rhyming Words
Read and Rhyme
2 Rhyming Mazes
Read, Rhyme, Write
👉 More FREE Rhyming Practice: Fox in Socks Picture Sort, Rhyming Words Lists.