- heavy paper or cardboard ramp (one for each child)
- down
- ramp
- slant
- slide
MA Standards:
Speaking and Listening: SL.PK.MA.1: Participate in collaborative conversations with diverse partners during daily routines and play.
Language: L.PK.MA.1: Demonstrate use of oral language in informal everyday activities.
Language: L.PK.MA.6: Use words and phrases acquired through conversations, listening to books read aloud, activities, and play.
Foundational Skills: RF.PK.MA.2.a: With guidance and support, recognize and produce rhyming words (e.g., identify words that rhyme with /cat/ such as /bat/ and /sat/).
Head Start Outcomes:
Literacy Knowledge/Phonological Awareness: Identifies and discriminates between sounds and phonemes in language, such as attention to beginning and ending sounds of words and recognition that different words begin or end with the same sound.
Language Development/Receptive Language: Attends to language during conversations, songs, stories, or other learning experiences.
Language Development/Expressive Language: Uses language to express ideas and needs.
PreK Learning Guidelines:
English Language Arts/Language 2: Participate actively in discussions, listen to the ideas of others, and ask and answer relevant questions.
Talk Together: Ramp Rhymes
© Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Department of Early Education and Care (Jennifer Waddell photographer). All rights reserved.
STEM Key Concepts: A ramp, or inclined plane, is a surface with one end higher than the other
ELA Focus Skills: Phonological Awareness, Speaking and Listening, Vocabulary
Educator Prep: Prepare a ramp for each child out of heavy stock paper or cardboard: fold the paper one-third of the way down and stand up to represent a ramp (long part is ramp, short part is ramp support).
Have children sit in a circle. Give each child a folded paper ramp and demonstrate how to stand it on the floor. Have children swipe their hand gently down the slanted plane of the ramp. Now explain that you want children to make that motion each time you say a pair of words that rhyme.
- Say, I’m going to say a pair of words. If the two words rhyme, I want you to slide your hand down your ramp. Model the procedure. Say the words ramp and damp and then slide your hand down your paper ramp.
- Slowly say each of the following words pairs: ramp/lamp, ramp/roll, ramp/damp, ramp/down.
- Then ask children to generate words that rhyme with ramp. Say, Now, I will say the word ramp and you try to think of a word that rhymes with it. (camp, lamp, stamp) Allow children to repeat your words if necessary.
- Repeat using other words such as roll (bowl, poll, hole) and slide (ride, hide, side).
Adaptation: You may wish to do this activity in a small group. Show children a basket of objects, including a toy ramp and a toy lamp (or pictures of objects including a ramp and a lamp). Give a child the ramp. Ask if he or she can find an object that rhymes with ramp. Display the two objects and say them aloud with children: ramp, lamp.