How Nursery Rhymes Assist Cognitive Development

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If you say the first line of a nursery rhyme out loud, it’s fair to say someone close by will recognize it and may even join in. They are familiar, comforting tunes and poems that we all grew up learning. With World Nursery Rhyme Week in mid-November, there’s no better time to discover just why they’re so beneficial.

Nursery rhymes are fun, familiar, and excellent cognitive learning opportunities, so let’s find out why…

The relationship between nursery rhymes and emotional learning

The term ‘emotional learning’ refers to how children learn about and understand emotions, feelings, and social cues. It’s how they develop empathy and learn to interpret the actions and feelings of others, so it’s an important part of their early cognitive development.

Nursery rhymes can help children develop these skills by drawing parallels between emotions and words and tones. They essentially show how language relates to feelings and how to communicate them to others.

Many nursery rhymes are silly, and that is reflected by the use of goofy words or amusing phrases and upbeat tunes. These kinds of rhymes will help kids better understand humour and help them work out when things are meant in a jokey context.

Other popular rhymes also include a degree of sadness, struggle, or other ‘negative’ emotion. This serves as an important early introduction to morality and the communication of difficult feelings. It is typically conveyed through harsher sounds and wide ‘Ow’ mouth movements with words like down and crown in Jack and Jill.

These intricacies all help children understand emotions, but rhymes can also support the development of social skills. For example, knowing the same rhymes and songs that other children in their peer group do can help children relate to one another. It supports the forming of bonds and belonging and builds self-esteem.

Speech and nursery rhymes

Vocal or speech development is when children learn to use sound and language to communicate. They start developing these skills from birth as they learn to recognise their names and others’ voices. Nursery rhymes are an excellent tool to begin and carry on this speech development because they include key aspects of speech such as:

Repetition of words – excellent for familiarisation
Patterns in speech – good for helping understand rhythm
Story sequencing (beginning, middle, end) – supports the learning of social cues and conversations
Identifying emotion in words or phrases – aids in the development of emotional learning
Practising articulation and pronunciation – build mouth muscles and increases confidence
Increasing vocabulary – plenty of opportunities to learn new words

How are nursery rhymes memory-boosting?

You’ve probably noticed that many rhymes seem to contain odd phrases, terms, and words that you wouldn’t otherwise encounter, so why is this? It all comes down to memory-building.

Nursery rhymes are full of patterns, and they are great for learning language and helping the reader identify similarities between words and syllables. This is especially true for unfamiliar or strange words and sounds. Since they’re so separate from day-to-day language, using them in a rhyme or song helps set a foundation for associating those sounds with memory and introduces them easily into the vocabulary.

The science of it is mnemonics and acoustic encoding.

For instance, many popular nursery rhymes repeat things like numbers, specific words, and sounds – this helps younger children learn things like maths (eg. The ‘99 bottles of beer on the wall’ rhyme). And others use simple tunes and rhymes to create a structure that’s easy to remember (eg. The month rhyme ‘30 days hath September…’).

Many of us learned to associate certain word patterns with teaching – such as ‘I before E’ or ‘Big Elephants Can Always Understand Small Elephants’ – this method of matching words to sounds goes on to assist children learning in later life too!

When is world Nursery Rhyme Week?

Nursery Rhyme Week usually takes place in mid November and promotes the importance of Nursery rhymes in early childhood education and development.

Here are a few top tips to help you get the most out of Nursery Rhyme Week this year:

Identify some favourite rhymes or songs and recite them with the kids in your life.
Help children to visualise the words or rhythm using clapping or acting out the story (for example, pretending your hands are the spider in ‘Incy Wincy Spider’.
Listen to CDs, watch videos, or read dedicated kids poetry books to boost learning.
Lead with fun – make sure the children know it’s a safe and fun time to express themselves when it comes to nursery rhymes and songs!

Cognitive Development and Learning in Young Children

Watch this video on YouTube

Before you know it, there will be a full-on sing-along going on!

As you can see, Nursery rhymes are a tried and tested tool when it comes to supporting child emotional and cognitive development. They’re ideal for speech development, emotional learning, and memory-building, so it won’t hurt at all to introduce a few to everyday life. Just remember to keep it fun, consistent, and let the children lead with the rhymes they like the most. Then, when they’re ready, support their learning by introducing new ones when the time is right.