7 Great Ways Nursery Rhymes Boost Children’s Listening Comprehension

Nursery rhymes pack a host of incredible developmental benefits for young children. Learn about how nursery rhymes help build your child’s listening comprehension skills, which is a pre-curser to reading comprehension.

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Rhymes, such as traditional nursery rhymes like Jack & Jill, are more than simple entertainment. They are a conduit to a host of developmental benefits. It’s never too early to start introducing nursery rhymes to your child.  Rhymes expose your child to the rhythm of language and to important language concepts and complexities. This exposure helps build fundamental listening skills for future learning and success. They also provide opportunities for stimulating your child’s imagination, self-expression, movement and coordination, and connection with family members and their environment.

It may take being more intentional in our digital age to keep oral storytelling and memorizing rhymes at the forefront, but there is plenty of evidence it is excellent for children’s development and that creating daily routines and habits of playing with rhyme with your child is a worthwhile pursuit.  It is also a fabulous way to give your child your undivided attention and to have a bonding experience where silliness, playfulness, and exploration are front and center.

And what could be better than that?

What is Listening Comprehension and Why is it Fundamental to Literacy

Listening comprehension is the ability to understand spoken language; to make sense of what we hear. Listening comprehension lays the foundation for future reading and writing skills and is central to many other skills needed for future academic, career, and personal life.

Being able to extract and construct meaning from spoken language involves multiple cognitive processes. Among them are working memory, focus (attending), theory of mind, recall, making predictions and inferences, vocabulary knowledge, and pattern recognition.

When your child hears a story, they are using listening comprehension skills to understand the story.  They demonstrate their listening comprehension when they ask questions to check their own understanding (comprehension monitoring), when they recite or act out parts of the story during play, and talk about the story, possibly even retelling it in their own words.

Children who have strong listening comprehension skills are better able to follow directions, follow and participate in conversations, and comprehend stories.

How Do Nursery Rhymes Build Listening Comprehension Skills

The key thing about nursery rhymes is they are an excellent source of providing short, rhythmic, and often interactive storytelling that is repetitive in nature. This is great for brain and literacy development.

Below are 7 great reasons why!

1. Rhymes Introduce Children To The Art Of Storytelling

Nursery rhymes lay the foundation for understanding the basic format of a story.  They usually tell stories with a beginning, middle, and end, with events taking place in a sequence.  Because the stories in rhymes are easy to follow, children more readily learn relationships between story events, such as cause and effect.

Nursery rhymes also incite imaginative imagery, like cows jumping over the moon.  They are full of memorable characters who have very defining moments, just think of Humpty Dumpty.

Imagery helps children create mental images of what is taking place in the story, helping them to follow along. This is especially true when they are told orally, where no pictures or other visual formats are provided.  The ability to conjure up mental images of a story’s events is powerful for building listening comprehension and a great skill for children to practice.

Lastly, nursery Rhymes, like Baa Baa Black Sheep and Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, are fun introductions to figurative language and sound devices, such as simile, onomatopoeia, and alliteration.

2. Rhymes Are Vocabulary Building

A robust vocabulary helps children with future reading comprehension and spelling.

Rhymes expand your child’s vocabulary because they contain many words children do not hear in everyday language.  Take Little Miss Muffet as a simple example, which uses the words curds, whey, and tuffet.  

Children may encounter words that are synonyms of words they already know.  They can learn the meaning of new words based on context. For example, in the nursery rhyme, Old Mother Hubbard, she goes to the cupboard to ‘fetch’ her dog a bone.  Children learn the word ‘fetch’ is another way to say ‘get’.

Rhymes also are a great way to introduce math vocabulary and concepts, like numbers, counting, size, shapes, weight, and other types of math vocabulary. Some classic counting rhymes are One, Two, Three, Four Five, Once I Caught A Fish Alive and One, Two, Buckle My Shoe.

3. Rhymes Enhance Memory Skills

Stories in rhymes are easier to follow because they are repetitive and rhythmic, and often involve rhyming words. These aspects of rhyme allow for easy memorization.

Additionally, movement is a great tool for enhancing learning with children. There are many rhymes where touch and movement are involved, such as Pat-A-Cake, Pat-A-Cake, and This Little Piggy.  Actions and movements done in time to the rhythm of a rhyme, not only help children with comprehension and memorization, but also aid motor development, visual and spatial skills, coordination, and cooperative play.

It’s never too early to start introducing nursery rhymes to your child.

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4. Rhymes Develop Auditory & Linguistic Skills

When children are exposed to various formats of oral language, they learn to discriminate between sounds (harsh/soft; loud/quiet; high/low, etc.) They also learn to recognize patterns in spoken language, including a vast array of linguistic aspects, including syntax and grammar.

Nursery rhymes also foster expressive language. They are short, repetitive, easy, and fun to memorize, which invites children to practice reciting them for themselves. This strengthens their mouth and tongue muscles to better formulate words. 

Rhymes also encourage practice with pitch, volume, inflection, and other forms of modulation, including articulation (physical placement of mouth and tongue to make speech sounds), pronunciation (can vary depending on region), and enunciation (how clearly parts of speech are made).  

Rhymes Develop Phonological Awareness

Children first learn how to distinguish the largest units of spoken sound — words.  They begin to recognize how words are separated by spaces, and how words make up sentences. They learn tonal changes representing punctuation or intent, and patterns of smaller units of sound making up individual words.

The repetition and rhythm found in rhymes help children segment words into syllables, hear similarities between rhyming words, and build awareness of individual sound units, known as phonemes, and how these can be manipulated to form different or new words.  These listening skills and abilities are referred to as phonological awareness.

5. Rhymes Build Children’s Attention Span

Many rhymes are silly and nonsensical.  They help children develop their sense of humour, which can foster resilience, self-esteem, and critical thinking. When rhymes are met with enthusiasm and exploration, children tend to be wholly engaged.  Children will often stay with the story the entire time through and want the rhyme to be repeated.  This is fantastic for developing your child’s ability to concentrate and focus, to use their imagination, and visualize the story in their mind. 

6. Rhymes Encourage Higher-Order Thinking Skills

As children learn to pick up on the patterns in rhymes, children begin to anticipate and make predictions about what might happen next. Rhyming words also help with making predictions; children may even call out what they think the next rhyming word will be if they have caught on to the rhythming metric.

Nursery rhymes help children to make inferences about the story as they follow along, using clues and prior knowledge to understand the story and make connections.  All these skills help build their creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving skills, and overall ability to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate information.  

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7. Rhymes Introduce Rhyming Word Patterns

Rhyming assists with creating rhythm which helps children to better hear the sounds and syllables of words

Children discover how rhyming words have the same ending sound.  This can later help them categorize words into ‘rime’ word families, which not only sound the same but also have the same spelling. A ‘rime’ is the part of the word that comes after the beginning sound (or onset). For example, in the words, ‘round’, ‘bound’, and ‘found’, -OUND is the family ‘rime’ word.  Word ‘families’ are very helpful with learning to read and spell.

However, it is important for children to understand how rhyming is all about sound. There are many rhyming words that don’t share the same spelling, for example, ‘sign’ and ‘pine’.  The best way to introduce children to rhyming is through oral formats, such as reciting nursery rhymes, singing songs with rhyme, playing oral rhyming activities, and reading poetry and rhyming books aloud.

Feature image for blog post providing list of classic nursery rhyme and song lyrics. Graphics of a cat playing a fiddle, moon and stars in the sky, and music notes.


Click on the picture to be taken to a great list of classic rhymes and songs for you to enjoy. You can easily search this list when you need a little inspiration, want a trip down memory lane, or just can’t quite remember the lyrics to a favourite classic.


Key OOliteracy Takeaways

Well, there you have it, seven solid reasons to hold onto your old Mother Goose Nursery Rhyme book for the true treasure that it is (or your culture’s equivalent).

List of seven ways nursery rhymes improve listening comprehension
  • Listening comprehension is about being able to understand what we hear and is central to many learning and social aspects throughout our lives.
  • Rhymes provide an excellent source to draw from to help build children’s listening comprehension
  • Rhymes build phonological awareness, a key player in future reading and writing proficiency
  • The cadence, humour, imagery, vocabulary, interactiveness, and repetition in rhymes provide development and literacy rocket fuel to little ones and can make a lifelong impact
  • Rhymes introduce children to poetry, rhyming metrics, and rhyming word patterns
  • Nursery rhymes and other rhymes are fun, simple, quick, and easy ways to incorporate into daily routines, drives, and reading experiences and children really can’t ever get enough of them!

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Hi, I’m Julie, the passionate creator of Ox & Owl Literacy. I enjoy empowering families and educators with wonderful resources to inspire fun, imaginative, and joyful learning opportunities for young kiddos.  You’ll find lots of recommended books, reading resources, and creative learning activities on this site aiming to help children fall in love with language, books, reading, and the transformational power of stories.

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