Revive the Lost Art of the Nursery Rhyme

Shortly before Tata’s (my great aunt’s) passing, I took my daughters to visit her in the hospital. She told me she had a dream that my girls knew all of their nursery rhymes. Shamefully, I thought, "They don’t."  It is in her loving memory, I am proud to say my children now know their nursery rhymes and I hope many other children will too!

The brain is a powerful pattern decoder.  It is how the brain learns.  It absorbs the world around it and makes sense of things through patterns and connections uncovered through the senses.  Our language is full of patterns. This language-pattern awareness is needed for literacy.  When a child has a grasp of sound patterns in the language, educators call it phonological awareness. 

“…Wise Mother Goose… “Tucked inside “Hickory, dickory dock, a mouse ran up the clock” and other rhymes can be found a host of potential aids to sound awareness- alliteration, assonance, rhyme, repetition. Alliterative and rhyming sounds teach the young ear that words can sound similar because they share a first or last sound”  (Wolf, p. 98-99).  

Parents and grandparents, practice nursery rhymes with your babes.  You efforts are building future readers. 

Wolf, M. (2007). Proust and the squid: The story and science of the reading brain. New York, NY. Harper Perennial.