Nursery Rhymes: A Simple Classroom Activity I Understood Differently This Week

Yesterday, during a teacher training session at school, I came across an idea that made me pause and rethink something I had taken for granted for years. As educators, we often use nursery rhymes as a natural part of early childhood learning. I always believed their primary purpose was to develop listening skills, improve pronunciation, build vocabulary, and support motor skills through actions and movement.

However, during the session, the resource person shared something I had never really considered before. According to her, nursery rhymes also help children learn how to move their tongues correctly while speaking. My immediate reaction was curiosity. Was this really one of the purposes of teaching rhymes, or was it an oversimplification of something more complex?

As I reflected on it and explored the idea further, I realised that there is some truth to it, although perhaps not in the way many of us might initially understand.

When young children sing or recite rhymes, they repeatedly produce a variety of speech sounds. Every sound requires coordination between the tongue, lips, jaw, and vocal cords. Sounds such as "t", "d", "l", "k", and "g" all involve different tongue positions and movements. Through constant repetition, children naturally become more skilled at controlling these movements. In that sense, nursery rhymes do contribute to the development of oral motor coordination needed for clear speech.

At the same time, educational research suggests that the benefits of nursery rhymes go far beyond tongue movement. One of the most important contributions of rhymes is the development of phonological awareness, which is a child's ability to recognise and work with sounds in language. Children begin to notice patterns, rhymes, syllables, and sound similarities between words. Research has consistently shown that these early sound awareness skills play a significant role in later reading success.

The value of nursery rhymes can also be understood through the work of educational theorists. Lev Vygotsky emphasised that children learn language through social interaction. When children sing together, imitate adults, and participate in group recitations, they are learning language within a meaningful social context. Jean Piaget, on the other hand, viewed young children as active learners who make sense of the world through repetition and experience. The repetitive and predictable nature of rhymes fits perfectly with this stage of development.

Another interesting perspective comes from emergent literacy theory, which suggests that literacy development begins long before children formally learn to read. Nursery rhymes expose children to the rhythm and structure of language, helping to build a strong foundation for future literacy skills.

What I found particularly interesting is that modern speech-language research does not generally recommend isolated tongue exercises for typical speech development. Children learn to speak more effectively by actually speaking, listening, singing, and communicating. Nursery rhymes provide exactly these opportunities. Rather than functioning as tongue exercises, they allow children to practise speech movements naturally within meaningful language experiences.

So, was the expert correct? I would say yes, but only partly. Nursery rhymes do help children develop the tongue movements and oral coordination required for speech. However, this is just one benefit among many. Their broader purpose includes language development, phonological awareness, memory building, social interaction, confidence, early literacy, and speech development.

This experience reminded me of something important about teaching. Many of the activities we use every day in our classrooms seem simple on the surface, yet they often serve multiple developmental purposes. A nursery rhyme may appear to be just a fun song, but beneath the music and actions, a child is developing language, cognition, social skills, literacy foundations, and speech coordination all at once.

Sometimes, the most ordinary classroom practices carry the deepest educational value. Understanding the "why" behind them helps us appreciate their importance even more and reminds us that effective learning is often hidden within the simplest moments.