An assonance and consonance scavenger hunt gives students a chance to seek out examples of the poetic devices in published poetry. Provide the students with poetry books or access to online poetry collections. The students search through the poems to find examples of assonance and consonance. If possible, print copies of the poems so the students are able to highlight the instances. Compare the occurrences of assonance and consonance in the poems each of the students find. Look for poetry with the highest rates of the two poetic devices.
Nonsense poems give the students a chance to practice assonance and consonance on their own. The students start by choosing random words they want to use in their poems. They identify the consonant and vowel sounds in those words so they are able to repeat them in other words. Encourage the students to focus more on the sounds rather than worrying about whether or not the poem makes sense. Let the students share their poems so the class is able to listen for the examples of assonance and consonance.
The word swap activity helps students see and hear the effects of assonance and consonance. Choose poems with lots of repeated vowel and consonant sounds. Use published poems or student-written verse for the activity. The students replace some of the words with similes so the phrases retain the same meaning with different sounds. By swapping out the words, you take away many instances of assonance and consonance. Have the students read the original and new versions to listen for the differences. Let them decide which version sounds more poetic and pleasing to the ears.
Students are able to identify assonance and consonance through reading poetry, but recording themselves reading the poems gives them a better sense of how the poetic devices sound. Create a poetry recording center with copies of assonance- and consonance-rich poetry along with a tape recorder. The kids record themselves and listen to the recording to hear the repeated vowels and consonants. To compare the visual and auditory identification, have the students first mark the examples of assonance and consonance while only reading the poems to themselves. When they listen to the recording, the students again mark the repeated sounds to see if they find any different instances of the poetic devices.