Nursery Rhymes
February 25th, 2008 by admin
Young children and pre-readers need to build lots of skills in order to prepare for reading instruction. Teachers, parents and care givers are charged with a big job: we must make sure these youngsters are ready to learn when they begin school. Children who have had experiences that build readiness skills have a huge advantage over those who have not.
One important area of reading readiness is called phonemic awareness. This group of skills will eventually help students understand ideas like rhyming, similar beginning and ending sounds, syllables, and the sounds that each letter makes. For young children, phonemic awareness can be developed through lots of language play and oral work. Hearing the sounds of the language over and over again, in many, many different forms and ways, will help them both to make generalizations about sounds and to learn the specifics required to build reading skill. There are several subskills in this area of learning, too.
Solid phonemic awareness skills can be broken down into several categories:
Phoneme segmentation allows children to hear the separate syllables and sounds within words. This skill will let them notice the different parts of compound words, count the syllables within words, and pick words apart into their component sounds to understand that /bear/ begins with a /b/ sound and ends with an /r/ sound.
Phoneme blending will allow a student to hear individual sounds and put them together to create a meaningful word. This is the skill that allows a reader to “sound out” a new word by saying each sound individually, then put it all back together to make a sensible word.
Phoneme sequencing helps with later spelling skills. Readers must be able to hear a word and know which sound comes first, which is next, which is after that, and what sound comes last.
Phonemic manipulation is the ability to intentionally change parts of the word. The concept of teaching with word families (the groups of words that rhyme and are spelled similarly) rests on phonemic manipulation. Children with strong readiness skills can readily produce a list of rhyming syllables (cat, fat, mat, bat, and so on). They can also change beginning, ending, or medial sounds on command, such as putting a /b/ in front of /rat/ to form /brat/ or changing the last sound in crate to an /n/ to make crane. Strong manipulation skills allow children to follow commands such as “Say swing without the s.”
Where do nursery rhymes fit into this picture? Actually, nursery rhymes are time-tested ways to teach many phonemic awareness skills. The rhymes at the ends of the lines help children to learn to hear rhyming words. A non-rhyming word when they have grown to expect a rhyme will sound jarring! Try reading your child’s favorite nursery rhyme and intentionally say a wrong, non-rhyming word at the end of a line. Chances are very good that your listeners will protest vigorously, which will provide you with a great opportunity to explore the concept of rhyming.
Another part of the appeal of nursery rhymes lies in their rhythm. Many can even be used as clapping games because their rhythms are so consistent. These rhythms are based on syllable divisions. Each vowel sound within a word forms a syllable with the consonants around it. There can only be one vowel sound in any given syllable. As you read these rhymes together, enunciate to make the syllable divisions more prominent. Talk to your child about the parts that the word divides up into. Clap rhythms, and before you know it, you will be clapping syllables. This will eventually turn into a great word attack tool for working with longer, unfamiliar words.
Alliteration (the repetition of similar beginning sounds) will focus your child’s attention on the sound at the beginning of the word. “Baa Baa Black Sheep” and “Pease Porridge Hot” are just two examples. See if your listeners can pick out the alliterative words and tell what sound matches in all of them. Try making up your own tongue twisters, too. Who knows? You may create a new classic!
No family or classroom library is complete without a great book of nursery rhymes. Here are some of my personal favorites!
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© 2005 Sandra Fleming
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