About this activity
Six long /r/ words: rhinoceros, restaurant, refrigerator, rainbow, raspberry, revolution. A short deck of hard words rather than a long deck of easy ones — the point is length, because a sound that survives a single syllable often collapses across four, and refrigerator has an /r/ in two places.
How to use it in a session
Break the word into syllables and rebuild it. Re-fri-ge-ra-tor said slowly gives the student a chance at each target; said at speed it usually loses both. Count the /r/ sounds in each word before producing it — rainbow has one, refrigerator has two — since knowing how many to make is part of hitting them. Ten minutes is plenty for six words done carefully.
What to listen for
Listen for the second target. In refrigerator and restaurant the first /r/ is usually accurate and the later one is not, because attention and breath have both been spent. Watch raspberry, where the /r/ appears twice and the middle of the word is often reduced in ordinary speech anyway — a small allowance is reasonable there.
Carrying it home
These are real words that come up: refrigerator, restaurant, rainbow. Asking a child to say one of them carefully, once, is a better home task than a list, because a long word is worth more repetitions than a short one.
Questions
- What grades is this for?
- Second through fifth, for students accurate on /r/ in short words.
- Do I need an account?
- No, all six words play free.
- Why so few words?
- Because each one is long. Six four-syllable words with two targets each is more practice than a dozen single-syllable cards, and the length is the difficulty being worked on.