Onset and Rime

We covered onset and rime in Module 2 when we examined how it helps build a child’s phonological awareness. As we’ve mentioned, children learn phonics as they build phonological awareness. Onset and rime is the technique that allows children to “put it all together.” Onset and rime is a synthesis of the synthetic and analytic approaches. The synthetic part is used for the onset and the analytic is used for the rime and the application of each new onset.

Children must first be taught that the onset is everything before the first vowel in a word and rime is the remainder of the word including the vowel. Students can then be shown that by replacing the onset or the rime in a word, they can make a new word.

For example, in the word bat, “b” is the onset and “at” is the rime. Knowing this particular word and which part is kept intact — the rime — allows students to form and decode other words using the same rime and different onsets. For example, the following words can be constructed with the rime "at" by changing the onset: cat, fat, hat, mat, pat, rat, sat, tat, vat, blat, splat, etc. This approach is consistent with brain research that suggests that the brain is a pattern-seeking device (Sousa, 2005).

Children who have learned onset and rime will naturally begin to recognize patterns in words as they read. When these children encounter words that they have not read before, they can apply their onset and rime skills to decode the words. This ability to recognize patterns and substitute parts of familiar words with unfamiliar words is known as decoding by analogy.