First Step Learning - Nursery Rhymes for Children

Do you remember the days when you were a small kid and were growing up with family, friends and siblings, singing your favorite nursery rhymes in your sweet Kiddush voice? Even though it may have been such a long time ago, we should always still value those happy moments of childhood in life, the times where our learning years were just started. Now it's time we pass on the same memories i.e., nursery rhymes to our young ones and help them share the fun and love. There are number of nursery rhymes to go around. Making kids learn and sing nursery rhymes is an important step to be taken carefully when they are growing up and started learning.

It helps them develop a sense of music in their lives, assist with their ability to communicate, and provides happiness and confidence when they sing nursery rhymes with family and friends, especially at school.

Nursery rhymes have a lot more to offer than just entertainment value to children. They introduce children to the idea of a storyline, promote social skills, boost language development and lay the foundation for learning to read and spell.

In fact, reciting nursery rhymes may be just as important as reading stories and talking to your child. A rhyme’s repetition can sensitize the children to the individual units of sound, called “phonemes”, which make up words. For instance, the line, “Baa baa black sheep” places three “b” sounds in a row; later in the verse, the words “dame” and “lane” highlight the long “ay” sound. Nursery rhymes are written in such a way that similar sounds come out at, which doesn’t happen in every day speaking. Having developed sensitivity to language, children are ready, at age 5 or 6, to think about the sequence of sounds in a whole word, a skill that is imperative for learning to read and spell.

Nursery rhymes and other repetitive languages help children learn to think their way through a word sound by sound in the order in which they listen to it. This ability, known as phonemic segmentation, is best predictor of future reading success of a child.

So, if you're looking for something to share with your child, no other option is better than sharing the nursery rhymes. As adults, it brings back fond memories of your childhood and you will be glad to share these great melodies with childhood memories with your children, you will be able to teach them and show them what you grew up with.

Benefits of Nursery Rhymes

• Cognitive Skills: Between the age of 1-4 years, children develop their conceptualization of color, shape, size, and movement, and many more activities. Nursery rhymes have been proven to increase the pace of development of these concepts among children, making them more receptive and active in life. 
• Verbal Skills: When children attempt to sing the nursery rhymes, they are deliberately trying to express themselves coherently. This makes them confident speakers and very less self-conscious.
• Motor Skills: The facial expressions, coordination, gestures, movements and balance needed to act out a nursery rhyme help children develop their motor skills.
• Listening Skills: While reading a nursery rhyme to your children, you are basically telling them a story. To make sense of the story, children have to pay attention to you and the rhyme, thereby making them good listeners – an invaluable trait for later years.
• Reading Skills: Even when children aren’t old enough to read, listening to nursery rhymes can help them become good readers later in their academic life and then rest of the life. Because nursery rhymes help them learn the alphabet and recognize words, syllables and corresponding sounds which are the basics of learning language. 
• Language Skills: Nursery rhymes expose young children to relatively more ‘complex’ words such as spool, eagle, humpty dumpty, hickory dickory, mulberry, thumb, puddle, together, clock, nimble and hundreds more alike. These are words that are not likely to feature in their regular vocabulary and so nursery rhymes help them learn new words and their proper pronunciation, which makes them better and active speakers from a young age. 
• Social Skills: When a group of kids recite or sing nursery rhymes together, they bond better with each other as they feel that they have something in common with others. This makes them confident and outgoing.
• Auditory Skills: The rhythm and sweet melody underlying in all nursery rhymes sensitize children to sound. The patterned phonemic and phonetic arrangement of nursery rhymes lets children catch repetitious sounds, making them learn tunes, tones, notes and the ways in which sound can be organized in a spoken language.
• Imaginative Skills: Similar as the bedtime stories, nursery rhymes open up children’s imagination as they draw pictures of places and things in mind, and imagine about a world where everything is possible. 
• Memory Skills: Repeated exposures to nursery rhymes generally make children memorize the rhymes. This plays an entertaining memory workout and lays the foundation for an effective memory for the rest of their lives.

Nursery rhymes have always been seen as a way to help children develop so why not continue the tradition and teach our children, sing along with them, and encourage them to learn the nursery rhymes just as you did when you were at school. If you are too busy not to sing with your children you have another option to make them learn nursery rhymes by buying those DVDs of nursery rhymes for which there is no dearth in online stores. You can choose any number of different nursery rhymes and children will love to watch, listen and learn the animated nursery rhymes.

Teach Children ABCs in Simple & Fun Ways

Children those who learn their ABC’s before they begin to go in the Kindergarten have a jumpstart in school for success throughout their educational life. The ABC’s (alphabets) are the fundamental building blocks of learning for the very young children preparing themselves to get their feet wet in the pool of education. This simple alphabets or ABC learning process will make this much required and essential information go smoothly for children and their parents.

In order to make your children learn the simple alphabets you can use a variety of methods, aids and tools, like, posters, flash cards, books, blocks stickers, etc. Once your children learn their ABC’s then a fun way to continue their learning is to teach them their ABC’s in the reverse order. Have you ever been asked to recite your ABC’s in reverse order? It’s a struggle in real for anyone who has never been taught how to do it. You can make your children learn the alphabets in reverse order and when your kids step up to show off their talent they will be endowed with cheers, astonishment, clapping, and words or praise from onlookers. You certainly will be proud on your children. And this can be done while looking into the Flash Cards in reverse order beginning from the letter “Z” then “Y” and so on.

Following tips will help you teach your preschool children their ABC’s and your older children their ABC’s in reverse order. Have fun!

Preschool

Music, rhythm and nursery rhymes are the aids through which most of the preschool going children learn. The repetition of lyrics and melodies are beguiling to young children and this is pleasure for them to do so. Kids going to the Kindergarten school alone spend three hours a day learning through songs, nursery rhymes or poems. This all makes your child learn the concept of their ABC’s, numbers, phonics, characterization and a lot of other significant conceptual strings speedily, conveniently and with much better understanding. Parents can also make some more efforts to make kids learn through other interesting methods, like blocks, puzzles, flash cards etc.

Hence, using the basic ABC song is the primary step for preschoolers to learn their ABC’s. Sing the ABC’s song regularly, as often as you can and also ask your child to sing with you. You can even do this while you are in your car with your child waiting on a signal for a red light to turn green or while you are cooking dinner, etc. Besides this, there are a lot of such opportunities when you can sing praise to this delightful song, which they will learn in Kindergarten anyway, but you can keep them a step ahead of their class, by regularly doing this.

Helping them to recognize the letters could pose more of a challenge. One method could be funny and effective. You can use Early Learning ABC flash cards or Flash cards for beginners and while they are going over each alphabet make a fun sentence or word to relate with that letter, let’s say, A. “Like A is an apple. An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” This will retain that letter in their little mind, and it works every time.

You can also buy and use fun ABC’s materials, such as the ABC refrigerator magnets that can be stuck on the refrigerator and played with together, ABC posters, charts etc. You can check out internet for these products.

Main points to address:

• Use flash cards on regular basis.
• Have fun while teaching, don’t take it as a tedious work.
• Try not to miss any opportunity to sing the ABC song.
• Add fun materials to incorporate the ABC’s learning.
• Remain cool and calm throughout your child’s learning process.