How many nursery rhymes does your child know?

Teach your child nursery rhymes…they offer great opportunities to stimulate your child’s language development. They may seem outdated, but they have been around for a long time because they work!

They are colorful, often silly, and use patterns of sound and rhythm that are predictable and pleasing to the ear. Many of them can be accompanied by fun actions. All of this makes them easier to remember than just sentences.

Children love to hear the same songs and stories over and over again. It gives them a chance to practice their newly developed skills on pieces they are already familiar with. When children are given the opportunity to use material they are comfortable with, they find that they gain master’s degree about new skills and have confidence in their use.

Before children can be good conversationalists, they need good listening skills. Children must develop the ability to remember the sounds and words they hear and then repeat them. This is called auditory memory. Children need a good auditory memory to become good communicators.

Many children, however, need help developing their auditory memory, especially if they have had hearing loss at any stage in childhood, such as from ear infections.

Children’s rhythms are wonderful for practicing auditory memory skills. In a fun way they learn to remember exact sequences of sounds and words. And words can often be combined with actions, which toddlers love, even before they can say the words. Songs that have actions are even easier to remember. Actions help words emerge.

Nursery rhymes allow for endless repetition, which means your child is practicing words and phrases many times.

In addition, there are many other language skills that children can begin to learn from nursery rhymes, such as basic story structure, sequencing (putting things in the correct order), and many different sentence structures. Nursery Rhymes also exposes children to a variety of vocabulary that they wouldn’t necessarily hear otherwise.

Research has also shown how important it is for children to understand the way some words rhyme. Rhyming is one of the sound awareness skills, called phonological awareness, that children need before they can learn to read. Being able to rhyme quickly and easily is also necessary for words to be stored efficiently in the brain.

Nursery Rhymes can help jumpstart thought processes, such as understanding cause and effect. They introduce many basic word concepts such as ‘above’ and ‘below’ and ‘over’ which help develop good comprehension skills.

Nursery rhymes have been recited and sung to little ones for countless generations. Kids love them and they work!