Rhyme and its phonostylistic features contents

1.2 The importance of rhyming

Rhyming helps babies and children learn about words, sounds and language formation.

Hearing and using rhyme, rhythm and repetition helps children develop early literacy skills. The repetition of words, ideas and skills is important for early brain development, as it creates secure foundations for early learning.
Using rhyme, rhythm and repetition in song, while reading or even to make up your own rhymes, is great fun for babies and children. Rhyming lets children learn about sound and have fun with words.
Making your own rhymes in conversation (for example, "let’s pat the cat" or "see the bee in the tree") or making a funny poem can spark your child’s imagination and can be a fun way to learn. Encouraging your child to think of their own rhyming words lets them get creative and explore sounds. Rhyming is a helpful first step toward phonemic awareness. When children play with rhymes, they listen to the sounds within words and identify word parts. For example, the /at/ sound in the word mat is the same /at/ sound in cat, rat, sat, and splat. Children typically learn to recognize rhyming words first and generate their own rhymes later. It is important to recognize that these skills are not always learned on a schedule. For some children, recognizing rhyme can be difficult. You can use different methods to help develop children’s skills.
Have children listen to and identify rhymes in books. Before reading, ask children to listen for rhyming words and raise their hands when they hear them. Or, stop before you get to the rhyming word and have children supply it.
Prompt children to produce words that rhyme. Both real words and “nonsense words” are useful, such as Peggy and leggy; turtle and Yertle.
Provide opportunities to recite rhymes in song. Music is a natural part of a child’s world. They can be active participants, clapping, snapping, and adding their own motions to songs. For example, “I’m a little lizard, my oh my! My skin has scales, it’s nice and dry.”
In this video, you’ll see educators use rhyming games, songs, and read-aloud books to teach phonemic awareness skills. As you watch, look for effective strategies used by the educators in the video and jot down answers to this viewing question in your Learning Log. A nursery rhyme is a traditional poem or song for children in Britain and many other countries, but usage of the term dates only from the late 18th/early 19th century. The term Mother Goose rhymes is interchangeable with nursery rhymes.
Illustration of "Hey Diddle Diddle", a well-known nursery rhyme
From the mid-16th century nursery rhymes begin to be recorded in English plays, and most popular rhymes date from the 17th and 18th centuries.[2] The first English collections, Tommy Thumb's Song Book and a sequel, Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book, were published by Mary Cooper in 1744. Publisher John Newbery's stepson, Thomas Carnan, was the first to use the term Mother Goose for nursery rhymes when he published a compilation Nursery rhymes may just seem like a bit of fun, a way to spend time and interact with your children or just a quick and easy way to distract them but the truth is nursery rhymes have so many more benefits for your child, both in the long and the short term and are incredibly powerful influencers in pre-school development.
Nursery rhymes have a lot more to offer than just entertainment value. They introduce babies and children to the idea of storytelling, promote social skills and boost language development. They also lay the foundation for learning to read and spell. Generally, children who will become good readers enjoy listening to speech, storybooks and nursery rhymesKey Benefits
Children are excited to learn about individuals who live in shoes or a cow who can jump over a moon. Nursery rhymes help your child learn to have a vivid imagination filled with colourful characters and various languages. There are also a number of key skills / development areas that can be influenced by simple nursery rhymes.
Cognitive development – Repetition of rhymes and stories is good for the brain, teaching how language works and improving memory, concentration, spatial intelligence and thinking skills. Because these verses are made up of patterns, they are easy first memorization pieces. Nursery rhymes are organised so that similar sounds jump out at you, which doesn’t happen in everyday speech. Nursery rhymes help your child’s brain segment words into syllables, hear similarities between words that rhyme or start with the same sounds.
Language and Literacy Skills – Nursery rhymes are important for language acquisition and help with speech development. They also help children develop auditory skills such as discriminating between sounds and developing the ear for the music of words. Listening comprehension is a foundational skill that is often skipped, but obviously necessary to learn. They are a great introduction to stories since many contain a beginning, middle, and end (sequencing). Nursery rhymes increase vocabulary (like the word “fetch” in Jack & Jill) and are a great, wonderful introduction to poetry. A rhyme’s repetition can also help your child become aware of the individual units of sound, known as phonemes, which make up words. Maths – Nursery rhymes are a great way to start familiarising your child with numbers. They’re full of patterns, sequencing, numbers, and counting (forward and backward). For instance, you might ask your son or daughter questions like; “How many blind mice were there?” They also discuss size, weight and other important math vocabularies.
Physical – When actions are linked to words in the nursery rhyme, it helps boost motor skills and improves rhythm and movement. Music training (through playing and listening to music) before the age of seven has significant effect on parts of the brain related to planning and motor skills.
Social and emotional – Nursery rhymes develop humour. Because of the connection between movement, rhythm, and words, singing these songs can be a great group activity and is a great opportunity for children to get to know their peers. As children develop at different rates, using nursery rhymes will support children’s communication and language development at whatever stage they are at, for example, older children may be beginning to learn to rhyme, whereas younger children may still be at the stage of learning new words. Nursery rhymes are familiar and can thus provide comfort and support to youngsters in uncomfortable situations.
How to help as a parent
• Identifying and singing your child’s favourite nursery rhymes repetitively will help them learn. If you sing along with your child, and clap / tap along to the beat or even use items around the home to make music, this will all increase the fun and enjoyment for your child. It’s also important to introduce new rhymes periodically to children to ensure you constantly engage their interest in learning.
• The more actions you use, the easier it will be for the child to visualise the words, as well as making it easier for the child to learn the nursery rhyme. To help in your child’s learning of nursery rhymes you could try missing out words in the nursery rhyme and having your child help fill in the missing words.
• Parents play a key role in promoting healthy reading habits. Simply reading nursery rhymes together daily can help to show your child how important they are. Select rhymes that teach concepts like numbers, colours, shapes, weather etc. to increase children’s love for learning.
• It is important that adults are confident when singing nursery rhymes and songs. If adults are having fun children are more likely to respond.
• Find a way to include nursery rhymes in your everyday routine. Singing nursery rhymes doesn’t just have to be during song time why not share a song or two during nappy time or when children are sitting down for lunch. It is important to remember that younger children will only sit for short periods of time so don’t expect them to sit for a half hour song time session.
So, remember every time you cringe from hearing “Humpty Dumpty” or “Hey Diddle Diddle,” just focus on how important these classics are to your child’s growth plus they are an excellent means of spending time together with your child and developing a close relationship. That may be why your second language students do better with rhyming once they can read; they would have greater knowledge of vocabulary and the language in general once they were reading — and these skills are evidently important in rhyming. That is also probably why rhyming has a more similar relationship to reading comprehension as the other phonological skills: These skills have little or no functional relationship in reading comprehension, but they do serve as markers of language proficiency or sophistication. The better one is with language, the better one will be with comprehension. But since rhyming plays little or no functional role in decoding, it is less predictive of decoding skills.
There is no question that all of these various phonological awareness skills — awareness of the sound separation between words, the ability to separate syllables within words, the ability to segment onsets (first sounds) from rimes (b/ig), the ability to rhyme, the ability to segment or blend phonemes are all correlated with each other. But it is the segmenting and blending of phonemes that has functional value in reading.
I would not put a lot of emphasis on the teaching of rhyme. It sounds to me like your teachers are approaching this appropriately and the policy is, perhaps unintentionally, steering them in the wrong direction.
Rhyming is an often-overlooked developmental skill. Children as young as 3 years old can play rhyming games and 4 years old can already recognize rhyming words. Rhyme is a great learning tool to use in your home environment to prepare children for school.
What is rhyme? Rhyme occurs when sounds from different words are repeated. It may be entire words that rhyme, such as the word bee, which rhymes with tree, see, glee, flea, tea. Or the rhyme may be found in the final sound of a word, such as puddle that can be rhymed with: ankle, bagel, castle, marble. Poetry and stories use rhyme in endless ways to convey thoughts and ideas.
Rhyme aids in language and cognition, speech development, reading skills, creative development, and social skills. Now, time to dive deeper into the five reasons why rhyme matters. SPLASH (onomatopoeia reference)!

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Language & Cognition
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