Nursery rhymes are all about word associations based on similar sounds. This helps students who learn how to spell and speak using the phonic system, the system in which a teacher instructs students on sounding out words based on their written composition. When children hear nursery rhymes, they learn to a make associations between the pronunciations in words. Once they reach the reading stage, this awareness helps them decode words that are unfamiliar because they recognize the word structure from the rhymes.
Learning nursery rhymes from an early age gives children the tools necessary to create a mnemonic device. A mnemonic device is a tool such as a song or rhyme that helps you remember something. For example, when you need to remember a sequence of numbers, reciting them in a singing tone will help you remember them clearly. Children can often remember the sequence of a nursery rhyme years after hearing it in class. Using the rhyme scheme of old poems as well as the flow, a child can create a familiar mnemonic device.
Young children often have trouble properly pronouncing words, making it difficult to understand them. When you challenge children to repeat a rhyme, their enunciation skills improve. The same goes with rhyming tongue twisters, though nursery rhymes aren’t as difficult. Having children sing along with a rhyme in class helps improve their language skills, making them speak clearly as they enjoy the activity. Allow the children to embellish the rhymes with new words so their grasp of the language improves as well.
People from older cultures learned the power of a good rhyme by memory. They used these mnemonic devices to pass information from one generation to the next. While the message warps over time, the base information can remain intact. Take the well-known poem “Ring around the Rosie” for example. Children recite it mindlessly at first, but later in their education they realize the poem is talking about the time when the Black Death tore through Europe.