Rhyming and reading

Jack and Jill and Little Bo Peep could be big players in helping young children develop language and literacy.

Education leaders say early knowledge of nursery rhymes is strongly related to the development of reading abilities. The rhymes are used to promote literacy skills including phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

"Some of best things parents can do to help their kids before they come to school are read to them and teach them nursery rhymes," said Hayden Peak kindergarten teacher Pat Drake. "They've kind of become a lost art, but they are very beneficial."

Karen Kowalski, director of the Early Reading First project in Granite School District, said nursery rhymes are a method to help children develop the pre-literacy skills they need before learning to read.

Plus, the comprehension skills and phonological awareness that accompany the knowledge of nursery rhymes tie directly into the state core, she said.

Nursery rhymes help in phonemic awareness — the ability to isolate and identify different sounds — and it's all auditory.

"Before children learn to read words they have to develop auditory discrimination, the awareness of how letters and words are put together, and phonemic awareness helps them to develop that skill," Drake said.

Through rhyming children are able to hear, identify and compare the sounds that make up words — something that must be learned before reading skills can be established.

Kowalski said aside from helping in language and literacy development, nursery rhymes are fun and engaging for children and help with memorization.

"They have fun themes that are relevant for little kids," Kowalski said. "And the rhythm can be tied with a motor activity that goes with the rhymes. That helps them learn better and helps them remember."

Moreover, nursery rhymes can introduce the story structure in a very basic form.

"Most of them have a setting, a problem and a resolution," Kowalski said. "They can also be the beginning of understanding how stories are put together."

Some of the nursery rhymes are riddles, which also helps in developing critical thinking skills and inference along with figurative language.

Kowalski said it is also important to teach children nursery rhymes because they are a part of cultural literacy with references found in all types of literature and conversation.

According to Drake, nursery rhymes go hand in hand with reading. They can be introduced through books and pictures and then memorized and used in other learning areas down the road.

"It all builds . . . it goes beyond kindergarten, because when they are familiar with them, then we can expand the skills, cut the words apart from each other and put them together, learn sentence structure and beginning sounds," Drake said.

Educators say it is easy to identify which children in their classes have been read to and taught nursery rhymes.

Drake said those students pick up reading skills faster and are more familiar with reading concepts than those who have not been introduced.

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E-mail: terickson@desnews.com