Benefits of Teaching Rhyming at Home: 11 Reasons Why
Children LOVE rhymes! Rhyming is such a beautiful and creative way for very young children to interact with the adults who love and care for them, and the world around them. Many parents might shy away from focusing on rhyming with their young children because it is something that they should learn at school. However, it is SUCH an important skill for young children to have. Not incorporating rhyming at home is something that could impact the rate of their development for many years. There are so many benefits to rhyming and areas of development that rhyming encompasses. Therefore, it is definitely not something that should be put on the backburner. The good thing is that rhyming with your child is easy and fun for both you and your little learner!
Benefits of Rhyming for Early Childhood Development
There are so many benefits to rhyming for child development that it is hard to even know where to start. Many of the skills that rhyming helps develop are primary developmental skills that create a foundational building block for all future learning. Here is a list of just some of the ways your child will benefit from the frequent incorporation of rhyming at home.
Builds Early Listening Skills
Before your baby can talk, they can listen. And they love to listen to the rhythm and patterns of the world around them. Rhyming is a great way for babies to start learning about the different patterns of speech that they need to build language. The repetition of rhyming stories and songs is also soothing for little ears because it is engaging, playful, and interactive.
Increases Memory
As babies and toddlers hear the same patterns in rhymes, they will begin to repeat them back to you or recite them on their own. This increases their memory by connecting multiple brain synapses during the process of listening and internalizing the rhyme. By memorizing even parts of a rhyme, a child is demonstrating memory growth.
Promotes Early Speech and Language Development
Speech and language development is one of the pinnacle areas of development that educators and parents alike want to keep on track. The ability to communicate with the people around them is an important step towards independence for children. By building on the listening and memory skills children gain from listening to rhymes, they learn the speech patterns associated with their favorite rhyming stories and songs.
Because of the repetitive nature and the wonderful play on words, young children naturally begin to use these patterns and speech sounds to develop words. When you encourage your child to say the rhymes with you, they are developing their speech and improving their vocabulary. Both of these are critical elements in early language development.
Practices Discriminating Auditory Sounds
Rhyming is primarily an auditory skill when children are babies and toddlers since they are unable to read at this point. However, this auditory development is essential for building language, reading, and writing skills. When your child hears a rhyme, they begin picking up on auditory patterns and auditory discrimination between words and sounds. This has a huge impact on developmental growth.
Learn Basic Rhythm and Beat Patterns
There are many reasons why children love rhyming songs, books, and games but I think the biggest reason is that rhymes have a catchy rhythm. Children can feel this rhythm and syncopation even at a very young age. You might even see babies kicking their feet or toddlers dancing as a way to express the rhythm they are feeling. The rhythm and song within rhyming is a beneficial way for children to start understanding the pulse and patterns of words that are written and spoken.
Engaging Way to Interact and Play with Even the Youngest Children
For parents looking for a way to engage and play with their young infant, using rhymes is a great way to interact and play with them. Singing nursery rhymes and performing actions to go along with them is very fun and entertaining for infants. They will also love hearing the sound of your voice and watching facial expressions as you rhyme and play with them.
How Rhyming Benefits Early Literacy
Did you know that children who have a solid foundation in rhyming skills are much more likely to be successful readers and writers than children who don’t? I’ve seen it many, many times in the classroom and it’s sometimes disheartening to see such an important literacy skill being lost in early childhood. While it doesn’t mean that children who don’t know how to rhyme, won’t learn to read, it usually takes a fair amount of intervention at school to build those foundational reading skills before they take off. Here are some of the ways that rhyming helps promote early literacy skills needed for reading and writing.
Listening and Speaking Sounds Build Literary Knowledge
Just as mentioned earlier, rhymes help children build listening and speaking skills. What’s wonderful about this is that these skills are primary building blocks for beginning literacy skills. Children need to be able to hear and speak letter names and sounds. They also need to have the auditory ability to recognize different types of sounds and how to produce them through speech. With the use of rhyme, you can help your child become successful readers before they even pick up their first book!
Starts Early Phonemic Awareness, a Building Block for Phonics
Phonemic awareness is a term used in the education world that focuses on the ability to hear sounds in words and manipulate them. It also focuses on understanding syllables, onsets and rimes of words, and speech sounds. By rhyming with your child at home, you are already working on these skills whether you know it or not! These skills of phonemic awareness build into phonics development. Phonics is what teaches children to read. Without those early phonemic awareness skills, children will have a hard time mastering the essential phonics skills they need to begin reading.
Makes Reading New Words Easier
Once your child has started to learn to read, one of the biggest challenges for them is building a large selection of words that they can read quickly, educators like to call them ‘sight words.’ When they have this basis of sight words, they can continue to build on them, allowing them to read more challenging stories fluently. With rhyming, children learn that the words ‘stop’ and ‘pop’ rhyme because they both end in ‘op’. They can use this knowledge to build word recognition of words like ‘top’, ‘flop’, and ‘mop’.
Builds Foundational Writing Skills by Teaching Patterns
With all the knowledge children gain from rhyming, between sound recognition and patterns in reading, writing is a natural next step. Children who understand the relationship between rhyming words and how they are similar can transfer that easily into their writing. The skills built from many years of hearing, reciting, and producing rhymes give children a great foundation of knowledge that they can use to produce impressive pieces of writing.
Promotes an Early Love of Reading
This has to be my favorite and what I feel to be the most important benefit of sharing rhymes with children. It promotes a love for words and books. Even if a child can read any book that an adult puts in front of them, they can only be a true reader if there is also a love and joy for reading. Since rhyming is such a fun and engaging way for children to learn and play with language and sounds, it is only natural that it will create an early love of reading that will follow your child throughout life.
How to Incorporate Rhyming at Home
I hope by this point you are completely amazed at all the wonderful things rhyming can do for your child’s development! If you are wondering how you can start incorporating some rhyming with your young children at home, here is a quick list of easy ways to make rhyming fun for you and your child.
Rhyming Books
- There are so many rhyming books out there! Your child will likely love them so I’m sure they will get some use. Once a child knows a book really well, it is fun to see how much they can recite back to you. My children love when I pause at the end of the sentence and they give me the end of a rhyme.
Nursery Rhymes
- There’s a reason why there are tons of classic nursery rhymes that have been passed on from generation to generation. And children today still love them! You can find anthologies of nursery rhymes online that your children will love to read again and again.
Silly Rhyming Games
- Anything can be turned into a rhyming game with your little one. Come up with funny words together while making breakfast, or see if you can find things that rhyme on your trip to the store or on a walk. Games like ‘Patty Cake’ and ‘This Little Piggie’ are fun to do with babies and toddlers too!
Sing Songs with Rhyming Patterns
- Singing songs is a great way to practice rhyming with your child. There are many, many nursery rhyme songs out there. The best part is that you can sing them with your child almost anywhere!
Stuck in a long line?
Sing a song!
Crabby during diaper changes?
Sing a song!
Need to quiet the screaming in the car?
Sing a song!
Children love to sing along too, and it’s an easy learning and bonding activity.
I hope I got you excited about rhyming with your children at home! The benefits are astounding when you put them all together! Feel free to comment and share some of your favorite benefits of rhyming or favorite rhyming activities you love to do with your kids!