Literacy Spot #23: Nursery Rhymes

We often sing nursery rhymes to entertain babies and young children but have you ever stopped to consider the language learning potential of doing so? These simple songs are usually a child’s first interaction with rhyming words, and learning to discriminate between the sounds in words and the sounds of parts of words is important to the process of later learning to read and write.

6 Ways to Have Fun with Nursery Rhymes

  • Sing regularly and often. This post contains a list of 50 common nursery rhymes and finger plays. Do you know them all? Immy and I sing in the car, in the bath, as we clean, even at bedtime.
  • Try acting out a favourite nursery rhyme with simple props and yourselves as the characters, or with puppets or soft toys.
  • With preschoolers and kindergarten aged children, make a game of mixing up the words of familiar rhymes as explained in this early Literacy Spot post.
  • ‘Write’ a letter to your favourite nursery rhyme character with suggestions for helping them solve their nursery rhyme problem. For example, what should Miss Muffet do about that pesky spider? Or how could you help Humpty Dumpty find a way to stop rolling off that wall? Transcribe your child’s words as they share their ideas and suggest they add a picture for the nursery rhyme character.

  • Use playdough or air dry clay to make the characters of the nursery rhyme and any props they need and use these to re-enact their adventures as you sing.
What is Childhood 101′s Literacy Spot? It is a weekly reminder of the importance of young children learning playfully as each week I share one idea for playing around with literacy, taken from my many years working as an early childhood teacher. Visit the previous Literacy Spot posts for more fun ideas for playing with literacy.

{Image source top}

13 Comments

  1. Not long after Ella first started childcare, her carer was amazed at how many words she was able to speak and the fact she was sitting there singing to the other children. I’ve always put it down to one particular (and very large) nursery rhyme book she received from her Nan. It has 100s of nursery rhymes and she knows a good 70% of them (the others I really don’t know how they go!). Now we have Baby Holly, I’ve pulled that out again in the hope it will help her speech development too.
    Love these ideas. Will certainly be trying them! 🙂

      1. It’s called My Nursery Rhymes Collection by Hinkler Books. One of those books you get from book clubs that come around to your workplace. I think it was something like $15! Ella’s now graduated to My Treasury of Fairytales, again by Hinkler Books. This one requires a LOT more concentration on her part, but she’s already fallen in love with Jack and the Beanstalk. 🙂

  2. There is a funny version of Humpty Dumpty, the title of which, has completely slipped my mind…he sinks into a sort of depression, then has to go save the king’s horses who have climbed too high…Humpty saves the day in his underwear (that always gets the little boys in my class going) and regains his confidence and continues climbing…I wish I could think of the name of the book and author…I can visualize where I put it on my shelf.

    1. Is it Humpty Dumpty Climbs Again?

      1. YES! that’s it. Humpty Dumpty Climbs Again! It’s a great book! Right up there with Scaredy Squirrel…another favorite about going out and doing new stuff…not being chicken hearted! 🙂 Thanks Chris, for telling me what I oughta know by heart, but after 36 years in the classroom I’m allowing myself to forget a few things 🙂
        Yall should see the GREAT NEW CHRISTMAS TREE that I rescued from a trash pile on my way home today…it is fantastic, and waiting in my car to take a trip to my newly polished floors in my totally clean classroom….( I’m also a middle aged bag lady, with sacks full of random tops and lids, coffee cans and paper towel rolls, buttons and remnants of yard, etc.)

  3. Wonderful post! I’m always saddened by the fact that children in the centres where I work seem to know so few nursery rhymes. They seem to be out of fashion.

    I’ve noticed that a good way to get very small kids hooked on them is to try to use nursery rhymes that contain their own name or something like it, or just replace a name in the rhyme with their name- eg ‘Tom Tom the piper’s son’, ‘Jack be nimble’, ‘There was an old man named Michael Finnegan’ (useful for Michaels and Finns!) etc etc, and recite it while dandling them on your knee or changing their nappy. Many grins and giggles!

  4. My small boy gets subjected to my singing pretty much endlessly (he’s not singing along yet but he does seem to like it – crazy kid!). We also got lots of out of the local Rhyme Time sessions at the library (and if you’re a Perth reader I must especially plug the sessions Joondalup council runs – hard to get a place on them but fantastic quality, especially for something that’s free!).

    Just last week I got a CD of nursery rhymes/kids songs from different countries (many in other languages) – we usually listen to lots of German songs because my husband’s German, and my son is used to them – but he really sat up and listened to the new ones – I think the sounds of other languages like Italian and Japanese were really interesting to him – I was surprised how much he noticed.

  5. My 2yo loves using our hand held Dyson to clean up after dinner 🙂

  6. The Great Nursery Rhyme Disaster is a fabulous book. We borrowed it from our local library and read it over, and over (and over)…

  7. In “Pirate Dora” there is a crazy bridge that doesn’t know the right words to nursery rhynmes… i.e. “twinkle twinkle little star how I wonder what you had for breakfast”. My children love it!!! Now that they know the correct words to the songs we have so much fun making up our own crazy endings to songs. A useful tool in joke telling too me thinks!

Comments are closed.