About Rhyme Time
Rhyme Time asks a simple question: which of these words rhymes with this one? It would be easy, except that English spelling and English sound parted company centuries ago.
How it works
You are given a word and four options. One rhymes. Tap it. After ten questions the game gives your score.
The words come from eighteen rhyming families, and the families have been chosen because their members are spelled in different ways. "Blue", "shoe", "two", "flew" and "through" all rhyme. So do "bear", "hair", "care" and "where". So do "great", "eight", "wait" and "weight".
The three wrong answers each come from a different family, so they do not rhyme with the target or with each other.
How to hear a rhyme
Say the words aloud. This is the whole secret. Your eye will mislead you. Your ear will not.
Ignore the letters. "Word" does not rhyme with "sword", and "great" does not rhyme with "meat", whatever the spelling suggests. But "word" rhymes with "bird", "heard" and "third", which share hardly a letter in their endings.
Listen to the end. A rhyme matches from the last stressed vowel onward. "Phone" and "grown" end in the same sound. "Phone" and "home" nearly do, but the final consonant differs, and a near miss is not a rhyme.
Try the word in a line. Make up a quick couplet in your head. If it sounds like a nursery rhyme, the pair works.
Be wary of look-alikes. An option that shares the target's ending in spelling is as likely to be a trap as an answer.
Accents vary, and the families here use rhymes that hold in most of them.
This is a lovely game to play with a child who is learning to read. As HTML5 games go, it does a surprising amount of teaching.