Monster Nonsense Words Rhyming
Rhyming is a very important pre-reading skill. The ability to identify rhyming words can greatly help kids who are just learning to read.
This monster set is a cute and fun way to work on rhyming words.
Monster Nonsense Word Rhyming
Monsters are one of my favorite themes – especially around Halloween time.
While many monsters are spooky and scary, I love themes with fun and funky monsters.
Monsters like this are so versatile. You don’t have to follow typical conventions like 2 arms, 2 eyes, 1 nose, 1 mouth. These monsters can have 1 eye or 10 eyes!
It’s great for a build a monster game, too, as you monster can be as silly as you want!
How to Use the Monster Rhyming Set
Each monster has decided they only like to eat items that rhyme with their own name. (They also have some peculiar eating habits, but perhaps that is just monster diet.)
Start by cutting out the picture pieces. There are two options for the items – pictures alone and pictures with words.
I included the version with words both for the adult’s sake (pictures like these are often hard to decode) and for kids so they can see the pattern in many rhyming words. Not all rhyming words have the same ending letters but many do. Seeing the same word endings can be a great visual for rhyming words.
Why Rhyming with Nonsense Words
Nonsense words are great for detecting whether or not kids are truly grasping the process of reading or if they are memorizing words. Many books and worksheets have visual cues to help kids decode the words on the page. While this is great for giving kids confidence and context clues about what they are reading, it’s not great for ensuring kids are actually sounding out words.
Nonsense words are a great way around this problem. Since they aren’t real words, no pictures can provide context clues. And since they are nonsense words, kids are unlikely to have seen them enough to memorize them.
In the monster set, each monster has a name that is a nonsense word.
