Advantages of Nursery Rhymes to Little Children

Growing up, all of us had our favourite nursery rhymes like Baa Baa Black Sheep, Humpty Dumpty, Jack and Jill, Ring a Ring o' Roses, London Bridge is Falling Down and many more! These days, thanks to technology, kids today would rather play with the latest gadgets than have fun with nursery rhymes. As a result, more and more children are unaware of nursery rhymes even when they are ready for preschool. Rhymes are crucial for your children's overall development. Here is a list of the top 10 advantages of nursery rhymes for you to consider:

1. Cognitive skills: Between one and four years of age, children develop their conceptualisation of colour, shape, size, and movement, just to mention a few. Nursery rhymes have been proven to enhance the development of these concepts among children, making them more receptive and active. 
2. Verbal skills: When children attempt to recite nursery rhymes, they are trying to express themselves coherently. This helps them become confident speakers and also makes them less self-conscious.
3. Motor skills: The facial expressions, movements, coordination, gestures and balance required to act out a nursery rhyme help children develop their motor skills.
4. Listening skills: When you read nursery rhymes to your children, you are essentially telling them a story. To make sense of the story, children have to pay attention to you and the rhyme, thereby making them good listeners, an invaluable trait for later years.
5. Reading skills: Even when children are not old enough to read, listening to nursery rhymes can help them become good readers later, by helping them learn the alphabet and recognise words, syllables and corresponding sounds. 
6. Language skills: Nursery rhymes expose young children to relatively more complex words such as spool, eagle, mulberry, thumb, puddle, together, clock, nimble and hundreds more. These are words that are unlikely to feature in their regular vocabulary and so nursery rhymes help them learn new words and proper pronunciation, making them better speakers from a young age. 
7. Social skills: When a group of children recite nursery rhymes, they bond better with each other as they realise that they have something in common with other kids. This makes them confident and outgoing.
8. Auditory skills: The rhythm and melody inherent in all nursery rhymes sensitise children to sound. The patterned phonemic and phonetic organisation of nursery rhymes lets children catch repetitive sounds, making them think about tunes, tones, notes and the ways in which sound can be organised in language.
9. Imaginative skills: Just like bedtime stories, nursery rhymes open up your children's imagination as they paint mental pictures of places and things, and think about a world where anything is possible. 
10. Memory skills: Repeated exposure to nursery rhymes usually results in children memorising the rhymes. This acts as an entertaining memory exercise and lays the groundwork for an effective memory for the rest of their lives.