The importance of rhyme in early literacy development and how we can help young children with this at home and in educational settings.

I’m starting a brand new series of educational articles about the development of learning skills and how we can best support young learners through genuine, play-based learning. I hope these will be of interest to parents, child-carers, teachers and home-schoolers of birth to 6 year olds particularly. I hope to be able to answer simple questions and explain concepts clearly and with lots of ideas to inspire you to apply these principles in good practice, too. Please do follow along and let me know anything else you’d like to see covered here. I love hearing back from you in the comments below!

The first articles are to do with some of the basics of literacy development, including storytelling and rhyme, the development of writing and how young children learn to read.

The importance of rhyme in early literacy development.

Recent research into the development and acquisition of early literacy skills has conclusively shown that rhythm and rhyme play a hugely important role. This is because children’s early literacy skills are about listening and speaking rather than reading and writing. These first two skills are the bedrock foundation for the latter, and create much stronger ability in the latter if ingrained deeply and early on. It’s simply not possible to be a good writer if you don’t first of all have a good vocabulary. Similarly, it’s very hard to learn phonics and sight words if you can’t discriminate sounds and rhyming patterns in an audible way.

In days gone by it was second nature for parents to sing rhymes, chants and songs to their babies, dangling them on the knee, bouncing them up and down and inventing actions and silly games to accompany them. But according to this research, many children are no longer hearing these rhymes and songs as often (or if they do, just a very few) and therefore not benefiting in the same way as they once were. During my 10 years of teaching 4-5 year olds, I met many who had never heard or sung a single nursery rhyme/ common childhood song, and even some who had been read to very little (if at all.)

But singing, rhyming and story-telling are oral activities that can be done anytime and any place, in the bath, on a walk, on a car journey, around the dining table. That makes it something easy enough to integrate into our everyday lives, with a little mindfulness, and the benefits are multiple.

What’s so great about rhyme? By singing and re-telling familiar rhymes and rhyming stories we teach or children: – auditory discrimination – listening skills – a rich range of language – concentration skills – oral storytelling / poetry skills -phonemic awareness

More specifically they learn:

* to be able to listen for and keep a steady beat

* to learn whole songs and chants off by heart from a very young age

* to be able to retell and sing these independently from a very young age

* to retell stories/ chants without using a book- good oral storytellers become great story writers

* to be able to complete a rhyming sentence or couplet by predicting the word that is missing

* to be able to discriminate rhyming words and identify those that don’t rhyme

* to make their own strings of rhymes during word play eg cat/ fat/ mat/ sat/ hat/ bat/ that

* to invent and experiment with making their own “silly” words that rhyme eg clat/ smat/ thrat/ grat/ vlat

They also develop good maths skills at the same time, which makes perfect sense and is very interesting!

The research states that when comparing the literary abilities of school age children, those who had a good understanding of rhyme from an early age, vastly outperformed those who had little exposure to it before they started school. So clearly we want to focus on rhythmic activities as much as we can in the early years and first couple of years at school. [This was something I learned on a development of early literacy course when studying at The Institute of Education- one of the best early years teaching courses in the world!]

How can we instil a love for rhymes?

* Sing and tell rhymes/ chants and songs as part of every day life during normal routines e.g. while getting dressed, eating breakfast, walking to the park, having a bath. The very popular “here we go round the Mulberry Bush” can be applied to everything going on at home and is often sung here! “this is the way we wash our hands….pick up our clothes….eat our food” etc . Start when they’re tiny babies and make it fun!

* read anthologies of nursery rhymes and poems, including many that are unfamiliar to you, and add them to the repertoire

*put together a collection of objects that rhyme and find the matching pairs!

* read a huge range of books from the library which have rhyming text, encouraging your child to retell these by memory or to finish off the rhyming words before you read them. The importance of rhyming text books cannot be underestimated! Julia Donaldson, Dr Suess, Nick Sharrat, This is the Bear series etc, are all excellent places to start. I think this is one of the most important things that we are not always aware of, and by adding more rhyming texts to our everyday reading, it can make the biggest impact. Here are 5 of our favourites that we couldn’t live without! And here is a new post with 50 of the absolute best rhyming books out there!

*make storytelling come alive with simple actions, funny voices and dressing up costumes!

* collect story props and make little storytelling baskets or bags to go with popular rhymes or stories e.g. a cow, a dog and a cat toys along with a dish and a spoon from the kitchen to sing “Hey Diddle Diddle”, a little cardboard star to wave as you sing “Twinkle Twinkle” etc

*add play dough to the above story props for an added, sensory dimension!

*use them in a sensory tub for even more tactile fun! This water play with the 5 little ducks was so simple to set up but very engaging and encouraged singing as well as storytelling and counting.

* borrow / buy / make simple puppets for oral retelling of songs and stories without using a book or picture

* buy or borrow CDs and DVDs with familiar nursery rhymes and listen in the car, bath or before bedtime, singing along together. Libraries usually have a great collection of these now. Do actions to go along with the songs and if you don’t know any, make them up!

* play fun word games as time fillers such as making strings of rhyming words that all sound like “pig”. They think it’s hilarious when it gets to a silly, nonsense word!

* clap/ pat/ stamp along to music with a steady beat, tapping out the rhythm of a chant or even a book. While teaching we used to stand up and stamp our feet to stories like, The Gruffalo, reciting it from memory like a strong, warrior chant! Go on an actual bear hunt around the house and garden, quoting the book and emphasising the repetitive refrain! There is strong evidence that feeling the beat and rhythm in your body makes it much easier to learn. They say great musicians were like this from an early age and it makes perfect sense.

*as an extension to the above, use chop-sticks or coconut shells to tap out rhythms in words and songs in music, books and chants. Pop them into a music-making basket to use over and again!

*make a more general storytelling basket so you can create mixed up fairytales, rhymes and chants for fun!

Have fun, keep it light hearted and enjoyable and remember that no time spent reading, singing or story re-telling  is EVER wasted. You are investing in your child’s future literacy skills and equipping them with the ability to become strong readers and writers in the next few years.

In short: solid rhyming skills will lead to greater auditory discrimination, stronger phonemic awareness and a larger vocabulary, all of which are fundamental building blocks on which the rest of literacy development is built. You simply cannot read and write in an authentic way, with true comprehension and independence, until these basics are well developed. Thankfully, its so much fin and so integral to our everyday lives with small kids!

Here are LOTS of fun ideas to save and try out:

Here are  all of our STORY-TELLING PLAY ideas.

Here are all of our RHYMING PLAY ideas.

Here are our WRITING and our PHONICS (early reading) ideas!

Follow my LITERACY PLAY pin board for loads more inspiration collated from around the web.

Follow Anna @ The Imagination Tree’s board Literacy Play Ideas on Pinterest.

Coming soon: the developmental stages of WRITING. Enter your email in the sidebar to get posts sent directly to you!

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