“Jack and Jill went up the ….?”

All of us who were exposed to nursery rhymes as children would immediately respond with ‘hill’. This is because we have heard this nursery rhyme over and over again, as our parents sang it to us when we were little or read it to us from our favourite nursery rhyme book.

I have been working with children for nearly ten years now as a speech pathologist and it always amuses me when I use this nursery rhyme to target the word ‘hill’ and I get different responses.

Most recently, Master Three responded with ‘mountain’. My first thought was, “Oh awesome, he can say ‘m’, ‘t’ and ‘n’ in a word’’, the second was ‘Hmmm, maybe he hasn’t heard this nursery rhyme before’.

I am a strong advocate for parents exposing children to nursery rhymes. Aside from learning those rhyming words (think “star” and “are” in Twinkle, Twinkle), children improve their oral language by singing along to the nursery rhyme.

Nursery rhymes allow children to learn new words through repetition, rhyme and melody patterns and builds memory capabilities. Plus, singing nursery rhymes can be fun when you incorporate movement patterns for fine motor and gross motor skills.

Luckily for us, the internet has search engines that help us find just about anything we want to know. So, where possible, take five to ten minutes out of your day to search for ‘nursery rhymes’ and their lyrics. Your children will thank you in the future if you give them the opportunity to learn new words, rhyme, and melody through nursery rhymes.

Thank you Mum and Dad for teaching me nursery rhymes! These songs now help me with the littlies I work with during speech therapy.

CB