Jj is for Jottings 50.  Rhyming, Climbing, Miming… (Part 1)

 

Children are not often introduced to nursery rhymes, these days, and in fact most seem to have little exposure to rhymes in their early childhood.  People seem to think that the old-fashioned nursery rhymes are silly and don’t make sense (which is true to some extent, but remember that many came about as political comment at their time of origin), but this doesn’t mean they don’t have value.

 

Research tells us that poor rhyming skills are a predictor of poor reading skills, although they are not as important as being able to break down words into individual sounds or to blend sounds to make a word.  I have found that it can be difficult to teach rhyming to young school-age children who are struggling to learn to read.  This is partly due to the fact that they try to approach tasks visually rather than auditorily (and this goes back to too much screen time and too little conversation in the home).

Rhyming isn’t just about nursery rhymes, but there are other rhyming poems, songs, children’s chanting games (such as ring-a-ring-a-rosy) and rhyming storybooks, and just plain word play between parents and children.  This is what children learn from early rhyming activities:

* 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 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.

* to develop auditory memory skills, which is another area of children’s functioning that I have seen take a nosedive in recent years.

 

More on rhyming next time.