Baa Baa Black Sheep & Other Rhymes

The importance of rhymes in stories for preschool and toddler aged children is extremely important. I'm sure you've noticed that your little ones listen more attentively to stories or poems that rhyme. It's a crucial part of their literacy development....check out this article on more about the importance of reading stories that rhyme to your child.

On that note, I LOVE nursery rhymes! Next week we will read and base some of our curriculum on them. I did my bulletin board this month featuring student art replicating scenes from Baa Baa Black Sheep, Hey Diddle Diddle and Humpty Dumpty. We built Humpty's wall with paper cut out bricks finger painted by the class, painted 3 sheep for our Baa Baa Black Sheep pasture and then I added a felt cow at the top  jumping over a glittery moon. (I'm sure I'll post a picture soon!) My favorite board I've done so far, for sure!

I think one of the best things about Nursery Rhymes is that they are completely silly to the kids! They have no idea what is going on half the time but they rhyme and sound so funny. We love singing about Mary and the crazy lamb that follows her to school :)

The benefit I see for my kids in reading and learning nursery rhymes is the phonetic awareness. Even early on, it's a big milestone for the kids to distinguish sounds from others and hear them throughout the day rhyming, even silly words (some that don't exist, in our dictionary.) Once they start to distinguish sounds they can assign sounds with letters and predict a word's sound (you know you do that without thinking about it now)....eventually becoming fluent readers and writers.

Here is the sample of the sheep we made. I found this idea and we made our own. (I'll post a pic later on.) I cut out the sheep body and head and legs out of black paper. We used a cotton ball and white paint to create the wool. Then I had them help me with the eyes and I assembled all parts at the end. They turned out SUPER cute, maybe even cuter than this! [I'm biased!]