Generations ago, nursery rhymes were created to help young children develop their rhyming skills. Nursery rhymes have withstood the test of time because the ability to rhyme is an essential part of learning how to speak and read. Rhyming is an early predictor of reading readiness, story retelling, creative writing, auditory discrimination, and sentence writing, so its vital to make time for a child’s rhyme!
Benefits of Making Time for a Child’s Rhyme
- Babies learn speech patterns, speech cadence, and auditory discrimination with rhymes.
- Toddlers and preschool children can gain readiness skills by listening to sets of rhyming sentences. This is important for word prediction, story retelling, experimenting with new words that have rhyming endings, and comparing/contrasting concepts of words that “do” and “don’t” rhyme.
- Kindergarten through second grade children can improve their ability to identify word families and word chunks. These are helpful for phonetic decoding, spelling, sight word recognition, and reading comprehension.
- School aged children can improve their creative writing skills by developing their own rhyming sentences, stories, and songs.
How to Make Time for a Child’s Rhyme In Your Busy Day
- Incorporate rhyming bedtime songs with your child before naptime and bedtime. Many rhyming songs are soothing, predictable, and reinforce routines at these times of day.
- Sing songs during mealtime with your child incorporating rhymes. Mealtime can be a great way to introduce rhyming with trying new foods.
- Attend story time at your local library where they often sing or read rhyming songs. Not only will this be a good exposure to rhyme, but the social aspect of story times will improve your child’s social skills and awareness. Encouraging social development in kids is so important, and incorporating story time activities into their learning can make a huge difference.
- Give your child a word and tell them to come up with rhyming words (even if they are non-sense words). Above all, this will reinforce bonding and relationship building in addition to improving creativity.
Get your Free Make Time for a Child’s Rhyme Printable (click link below)
Link for Free Rhyming Printable 
Download this free rhyming worksheet for rhyming practice with young children. If your child cannot read or write yet, simply ask them if they can identify the missing rhyming word.
Also take advantage of these free nursery rhymes and rhyming songs from YouTube that you can use with your child.
Thanks for reading Make Time for a Child’s Rhyme. Check out these additional articles for the use of rhyming: Benefits of Rhyming and Importance of Rhyming. Remember to tell us your favorite rhyme song in the comments below!