Rhymes and Story Time
Nursery rhymes may just seem like a bit of fun, a way to spend time and interact with your children or just a quick and easy way to distract them but the truth is nursery rhymes have so many more benefits for your child, both in the long and the short term and are a powerful learning tool in supporting children to develop.
Nursery rhymes have a lot more to offer than just entertainment value. They introduce children to the idea of storytelling, promote social skills and boost language development. They also lay the foundation for learning to read and spell. Generally, children who will become good readers enjoy listening to speech, storybooks and nursery rhymes.
Key Benefits
Children are excited to learn about individuals who live in shoes or a cow who can jump over a moon. Nursery rhymes help your child learn to have a vivid imagination filled with colourful characters and various languages. There are also a number of key skills / development areas that can be influenced by simple nursery rhymes.
Cognitive development – Repetition of rhymes and stories is good for the brain, teaching how language works and improving memory, concentration, spatial intelligence and thinking skills. Because these verses are made up of patterns, they are easy first memorization pieces. Nursery rhymes are organised so that similar sounds jump out at you, which doesn’t happen in everyday speech. Nursery rhymes help your child’s brain segment words into syllables, hear similarities between words that rhyme or start with the same sounds.
Language and Literacy Skills – Nursery rhymes are important for language acquisition and help with speech development. They also help children develop auditory skills such as discriminating between sounds and developing the ear for the music of words. Listening comprehension is a foundational skill that is often skipped, but obviously necessary to learn. They are a great introduction to stories since many contain a beginning, middle, and end (sequencing). Nursery rhymes increase vocabulary (like the word “fetch” in Jack & Jill) and are a great, wonderful introduction to poetry. A rhyme’s repetition can also help your child become aware of the individual units of sound, known as phonemes, which make up words.
Maths – Nursery rhymes are a great way to start familiarising your child with numbers. They’re full of patterns, sequencing, numbers, and counting (forward and backward). For instance, you might ask your son or daughter questions like; “How many blind mice were there?” They also discuss size, weight and other important math vocabularies.
Physical – When actions are linked to words in the nursery rhyme, it helps boost motor skills and improves rhythm and movement. Music training (through playing and listening to music) before the age of seven has significant effect on parts of the brain related to planning and motor skills.
Social and emotional – Nursery rhymes develop humour. Because of the connection between movement, rhythm, and words, singing these songs can be a great group activity and is a great opportunity for children to get to know their peers. As children develop at different rates, using nursery rhymes will support children’s communication and language development at whatever stage they are at, for example, older children may be beginning to learn to rhyme, whereas younger children may still be at the stage of learning new words. Nursery rhymes are familiar and can thus provide comfort and support to youngsters in uncomfortable situations.
At WFSN we focus on two rhymes every week in Reception. One is our Rhyme of the week and one is our Nursery rhyme of the week.
Each child has their own 'Rhyme of the week' book which comes home with them every Friday. In here you will find a copy of the rhyme that we have learnt in school that week. The children will say this rhyme numerous times across the week and learn actions to go alongside. This book and rhyme is then sent home for your child to share and teach to you.
Each week we also have a focus Nursery rhyme/song. See below which Nursery Rhymes we will learn over the year.
All of the above rhymes can be found on the BBC Nursery Rhyme website which can be access by clicking on the picture below.
At Wimborne First School and Nursery we strive to share high quality texts with the children to encourage a love of reading and build children’s language and vocabulary as a foundation for reading and writing.
We therefore have identified a selection of books that we will share with the children over the year. Please see our Reception Reading Diet below.