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 between 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 children: auditory discrimination, listening skills, a rich range of language, concentration skills, oral storytelling / poetry skills and 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

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. How can we instil a love for rhymes?

• Sing and tell rhymes/ chants and songs as part of everyday life during normal routines e.g. while getting dressed, eating breakfast, walking to the park, having a bath. 
• Read anthologies of nursery rhymes and poems
• Read a huge range of books which have rhyming text, encouraging your child to retell these by memory or to finish off the rhyming words before you read them.

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.

From: Various Resources