There are many ways that teachers and parents engage children in literacy learning.

Rhyming is an excellent way for children to play with language and develop vocabulary, literacy, and language skills.  A rhyme makes language accessible and predictable and easy for young children to remember.  Through rhyming repetition, children quickly gain familiarity and then mastery of the language.

Infants: Alice Sterling Honig author of Secure Relationships: Nurturing Infant Toddler Attachments in Early Care Settings says “Every parent wants to boost their baby’s chances of succeeding later…  Reading daily with your baby, starting from infancy, is one of the single most powerful tools for stimulating a deep fondness for books and learning.”   Reading nursery rhymes to infants like “Mary, Mary Quite Contrary” are just the right length and allow parents and caretakers to develop a nurturing, warm, and trusting relationship.

Toddlers: The motivation of using nursery rhymes from my book Teaching with Heart… with toddlers is to expand their vocabulary to help them communicate with others.  Adding motions like fingerplays, sound effects, and props encourages toddlers to participate.  Repeating rhymes when children snack, play outdoors, at rest time and diaper changing time can help to make it easy for toddlers to remember them.  Most nursery rhymes phrases end with rhyming words.  Encourage toddlers to build rhyming skills by leaving off the last word of a phrase and asking them to add it.

Preschoolers: Adults should seek out daily opportunities to rhyming with children, and since regular reading at home is a potent force in promoting children’s literacy, nightly readings can reap substantial long-term benefits.  Some research suggests that the roots of phonemic awareness, a powerful predictor of later reading success, are found in traditional rhyming, skipping, and word games.  A fun word game to play is to rewrite nursery rhymes with the children’s help by using their names and favorite activity.  The following is an example of the rewriting of “Mary, Mary Quite Contrary.”

Randy, Randy is quite handy, how do you build so tall?

Carefully putting blocks all in rows, so that they will not fall.

Ellen Booth Church author of  25 Literacy-Building Art Activities suggests a word game called “Chime in With a Rhyme” where the adult say “If I say rug, you say ___.  How many words can we rhyme.”  She says to invite children to say both make-believe and real words. As children work together to create rhymes, they learn to listen for rhyming sounds and develop the capacity to listen to one another.