Today’s APRIL SHOWER WORD POWER – eye rhyme

Here are a couple of little WORD questions for your kids: Do the words daughter and laughter rhyme?

How about love/move?  Or said/maid?

OK.  Here are a few more: come/home,  gather/father,  doll/roll,  rain/again.

The answers, of course, are NO.  These word couples do not rhyme, even though they are spelled similarly.

That’s what an eye rhyme is — an imperfect rhyme that appears to have identical vowel sounds from similarity of spelling, but are pronounced differently. The words rhyme by sight (eye), but not pronunciation.

An eye rhyme most likely began as an exact rhyme, but many words have changed/shifted in pronunciation in history and over time.  The word again is a good example, as at one time it was pronounced a-gain (as in rain).

Ah, ha!  Now your kids can put a name – eye rhyme – to that little rhyming problem in some poems and songs.

Don’t you just love knowing stuff like this?  Your kids surely will.

Check in every day in April for WORD POWERS your kids will enjoy, as well as enhance vocabulary.