An open box from The Play Way’s Sounds and Rhymes Play Kit displays educational toys, books, and colorful spot markers. Inside are CVC Word Builders, Slimy Rhymes, Shape and Sound cards, storybooks, and additional learning materials designed to help children build early reading skills and sound awareness through engaging phonological games.

Sounds and Rhymes Play Kit

Name: Sounds and Rhymes Play Kit
Brand: The Play Way
SKU: SOUNDAWARENESS-01
Price: 149.0 AUD
Availability: InStock

The Play Way

$149.00

$149.00 ~~$0.00~~

Save

Tax included.

Hub members get 30% off. Become a Hub member. Already a Hub Member? Log in to access your discount.

Reading and writing start long before school does. If your child is heading into kindy or prep and you're wondering what you can actually do at home to set them up well, this is it.

This toolbox pairs with the Sound Awareness Program in the Hub and was developed by our speech pathologists to build the pre-literacy foundations that formal schooling depends on: rhyming, sound discrimination, blending, segmenting and early phonics. Spot markers, Slimy Rhymes, Eye Spy with My Little Eye, CVC Word Builders, Shape-a-Sound and a facilitator pamphlet all work together to turn those skills into games your child actually wants to play.

The activities cover phonological awareness, vocabulary, early reading and spelling, fine motor coordination and cooperative play. Everything is adaptable, so you can scale up or down depending on where your child is at. And because it's play-based, they'll be building the foundations for literacy without it feeling like study.

Suitable for ages 3-6.

The Sounds and Rhymes Play Kit, previously named the Sound Awareness Program, is a children's pre-literacy and phonological awareness kit put together by paediatric speech pathologists in Australia, for children building sound awareness, rhyming, syllables, blending, segmenting and early phonics before formal reading and spelling begin.

It includes six tools: coloured spot markers, the Slimy Rhymes rhyming game, Eye Spy with My Little Eye, the CVC Word Builders game with over a hundred letter tiles and fifty picture cards, the Shape-a-Sound alphabet card and wax stick set, and a parent guide. Ways to play booklets come with the rhyming game, Eye Spy, the word builders and Shape-a-Sound, each carrying a QR code to video demonstrations.

Every kit also comes with supporting video in The Play Way Hub, included: sixty five short sessions covering every game in the box and the sound awareness hierarchy, from word awareness and syllable awareness through rhyme, alliteration, onset and rime, first and last sounds, blending, segmenting, sound deletion and letter to sound correspondence. There is a downloadable multisyllabic resource for segmenting, blending and deleting syllables as well. Most families using this kit have a child somewhere between 3 and 6, the stretch where rhyme lands first and blending and segmenting usually arrive around the move into school. That is a guide rather than a rule. Children build these skills at their own pace, so choose by what is getting in the way rather than by a birthday.

Which of the three language play kits to choose: Early Years Language is for the child who is trying to tell you something and has no words for it yet. Sounds and Rhymes is for the child who talks easily and is about to meet reading and writing. Language and Conversation is for the older child who talks plenty but loses the thread of a conversation or a story.

From The Play Way, built by an OT who has worked with children for nearly 20 years. Ships Australia wide. Contains small parts and items recommended for ages 3 and up, and adult supervision is needed.

Ask a question

Size guide

Sounds and Rhymes Play Kit

$149.00

$149.00 ~~$0.00~~

WHAT'S INSIDE

What's in this play kit

A full kit of play-tools, curated to work together.

Spot markers

Coloured discs to lay out on the floor to turn sound into movement. Give your child a word and they hop it out, one spot per syllable in kangaroo or one spot per sound in cat, so the parts of a word turn into something they can see and land on.

Slimy Rhymes

A matching game for rhyming pairs, played with monsters. We love the silly sentence rule: once your child has found the pair they have to put both words into one sentence, and that is the part that makes a rhyme stick.

Eye Spy with My Little Eye

Picture boards packed with tiny illustrations, and your child hunts down the ones starting with the sound you are after. The ways to play booklet uses the same boards to cover syllables, for rhymes and for early spelling, so your child meets each new skill on a board they already know their way around.

CVC Word Builders

Over a hundred letter tiles, colour coded so the vowels and the consonants look different, with picture tiles and boards to build the word on. The matching cards have the word printed on the back, so your child checks their own spelling instead of waiting to be marked.

Shape-a-Sound

Twenty six illustrated alphabet cards with the capital and the lower case letter on each, and wax sticks to bend into the shape on top. Making the letter with their fingers gives your child the shape and the sound at the same time, bringing an interactive and multi-sensory experience.

Parent Guide

A guide for you (the adult), covering what each game is working on, how to make one easier or harder on the day, and where these skills sit in the build up to learning to read.

Why we built it this way

It starts in the ear, not on the page

Hearing that cat is made of three sounds comes before reading it, and at that point it has nothing to do with letters at all. It’s all about the sounds. The games in this kit work through it in order, whole words first, then syllables, then rhyme, then the single sounds, then the letters that stand for them.

They can be up and moving

With this kit your child hops the syllables out across the floor, or holds up two rhyming monsters, or bends a wax stick into a letter. They play. And this helps them learn and retain the information for building on future skills like reading and writing.

The same game, just adapting the levels

When the single sounds are too hard, you can adapt the levels, the videos teach you how. Nothing gets put away half learned or too-hard, and they build their skills and confidence over time.

INCLUDED WITH YOUR PLAY KIT

The videos that come with it

Everything in the kit is ready to use from the day it arrives, so your child can be jumping over a line of spot markers as soon as it is open. When you want the learning behind it, there is close to two and a half hours of video across sixty five short sessions. One of our speech pathologists goes through every game in the box, then plays each of the ways to play so you can watch before you try it. There is also a set for you on what sound awareness actually is and the order these skills develop, from syllables and rhyme through to blending, breaking words apart and the first letter sounds. The same set covers how to keep playing with sounds out loud with your child in their normal everyday. We'll send your invitation to access it all when your kit ships.

WHO THIS PLAY KIT IS FOR

If starting school looks like this

They talk beautifully, and rhyming words is still a total mystery.
I read to them every night and I have no idea what else I am meant to be doing.
I found reading hard myself, and I do not want the same thing for them.

If any of that sounds like your child, this is who we built the play kit for.

Who made this

Kait is an OT. She has been working with children and families for nearly 20 years, and she has four kids of her own. She built this play kit alongside the speech pathologist team because talking and reading are not learned the same way. Most children pick up talking by being talked to. Reading has to be taught, and the part that has to come first is sounds, and there’s so much fun and play to be had at this age that she couldn’t resist creating something for this stage of language development. The five games were curated by our therapy team so the skills are developed in order, from hearing whole words down to the single sounds inside them. Your child is playing a matching game or jumping across the floor, and the learning happens in amongst all the games and the play, not as a structured drill sequence.

5,000+
Australian children have used our play kits
20 years
of Kait working with children and families

Sounds and Rhymes Play Kit