Nursery Rhyme Teaching Ideas

Nursery rhymes are a wonderful way to get children interested in reading, build their rhyming, print awareness, and sequencing skills. They also provide opportunities to work on letter and sight word recognition, and speaking in front of a group through dramatizations of the rhymes.

Nursery rhymes are also a great resource because they are available in a number of formats. Most early childhood teachers have the colorful nursery rhyme posters, but there are many versions in book form as well, such as the Dollar Tree books in the top picture and the picture below this paragraph.

In addition to the book and poster formats, I also make a sentence strip version of each rhyme for pocket chart work. I like this format best for large-group work because often the print on the posters and books is very small. I use the pocket chart versions with a pointer, and, in addition to enjoying the rhyme, we work on the following skills:

* counting words in a line (Sometimes we make this a hands-on activity by connecting a Unifix cube for each word in the line.)

* looking for spaces between the words

* identifying letters, sight words, or the rhyming words with highlighter strips (The ones in the first picture are from Calloway House. The second set is from Really Good Stuff. I have the RGS ones, which I like because they can be easily cut into smaller pieces for identifying letters or spaces between words.)

* identifying the words that rhyme by clapping on those words, lowering our voice to a whisper on those words, or singing those words

* I also have a set of nursery rhyme sequencing cards that the children use to retell the rhymes. They can put the cards in order on a table, the floor, or a pocket chart as they recite the rhyme. Later in the year when the children have more writing experience, they like to put the cards in order and then try to write the nursery rhyme on paper from memory. (I will post photos of these cards when I can get back into my classroom. They are excellent and are more like "prompts" than actual sequencing cards. I believe they were actually a bulletin board set from a website such as Teacher's Paradise.) Enchanted Learning does have printable nursery rhyme sequencing cards, though.

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