Exposure to rhythm and rhyme can help children to reproduce language and speak with confidence. It’s also a lot of fun! Rhythm can be developed in lots of ways, such as stamping, clapping or banging on pots and pans. Rhyming is a tricky concept to grasp but nursery rhymes and action songs are excellent for supporting awareness of both rhythm and rhyme and the more that your child hears and knows the better. This will help your child to: experience and appreciate rhythm and rhyme and develop awareness of rhythm and rhyme in speech; increase awareness of words that rhyme and to develop knowledge about rhyme; and talk about words that rhyme and produce rhyming words. At home you could:
- Read rhyming books and sing nursery rhymes.
- Encourage joining in with repeated words and refrains.
- March in time to songs eg ‘Grand Old Duke’.
- Clap the syllables in names Mum/my or Is/o/bel.
- Make up patterns of claps or stamps for copying.
- Play ‘I know a word’ eg I know a word which rhymes with cat you wear on your head it’s a …
