Why nursery rhymes make great children’s songs

We’ve all seen how excited toddlers get when they hear children’s songs based on nursery rhymes. While it’s great that young children enjoy nursery rhymes so much, what’s more important is the myriad benefits and positive effects they can have on a child’s development.

When you sing lullabies and play a baby CD for your child, you help their brain grow and develop. Most infants are sung to from day one in an effort to soothe and comfort them—while the goal may be to get them to sleep, it’s actually one of our earliest forms of communication with them. As they become toddlers, they will typically respond to baby music CDs by dancing and singing along. This obviously boosts their fledgling vocabulary, but did you know it also stimulates their frontal lobes? This is fundamental to their language development and phonemic learning.  

Children’s songs that include nursery rhymes offer children the opportunity to recognize and develop an appreciation for rhyme and rhythm. The repetition helps build language and memorization skills. When a nursery rhyme is combined with musical baby toys such as a book with pictures, it expands the experience into visuals and storytelling. In addition, nursery rhymes help children to use their imagination to create mental pictures to associate with words.

Playing with musical baby toys and singing along with your children will help your child associate this type of learning with fun. It’s also a great tool for building social skills. When teachers pop a baby CD of nursery rhymes in for a group of young children, they find that even the shyest ones participate when everyone starts to dance or sing along. Most will know the rhymes already or can learn them quickly—this helps them find a commonality with the other children and helps them build self-confidence.

When children sing and dance to baby music CDs, they learn to recognize the connection between rhythm, movement and words, which further builds their vocabulary and language skills—and increases their fun!

Photo source: static.stuff.co.nz