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.