Rhymes look like a charming, slightly old-fashioned bit of childhood. They are actually one of the most powerful pre-reading activities in existence. Decades of research consistently show that children who grow up with a steady diet of rhymes, songs, and chants develop the ear-level skills that make learning to read dramatically easier. The technical name is phonological awareness — the ability to hear that cat and hat share a sound, that butterfly has parts, that snake starts with a hissing /s/. Without this ability, phonics doesn't really click. With it, phonics tends to click on its own.
This piece is a practical collection of rhymes and chants — old classics, modern silly ones, and a few invented on the spot — along with the why and how of using them. Kluriko's Lärspel — Kluriko's learning-games world — has rhyme-based games for screen time, but rhymes are mostly something to chant in the car, sing in the bath, and giggle through at bedtime. The car ride is the classroom.
Why rhymes work
Children's brains are pattern-matching machines. When you say cat and then hat, a young brain notices the matching ending and starts to register that words have insides — sounds you can pull apart and swap. This is the foundational insight all of reading depends on. A child who can hear that moon and spoon rhyme is several months closer to understanding that you can change one sound in cat to make bat.
Three specific benefits:
- Rhyme awareness predicts later reading skill. It's one of the best preschool-age predictors there is.
- Rhymes train memory. Children remember rhymed text far better than prose. This builds confidence and vocabulary.
- Rhymes are emotionally warm. They're almost always delivered with a smile, in a cuddle, in a moment of low pressure. The brain learns better when it's safe.
You don't need to "teach" rhymes. You need to chant them, often, with delight.
The classics worth knowing
Most cultures have a treasury of traditional rhymes. In English, a working starter set looks roughly like this:
- Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star
- Humpty Dumpty
- Hickory Dickory Dock
- Jack and Jill
- Itsy Bitsy Spider (with the hand actions)
- Row, Row, Row Your Boat
- Old MacDonald
- Five Little Ducks
- Wheels on the Bus
A few are slightly dark if you stop to think about them. That's fine — children don't analyse them, they enjoy the rhythm. Don't bowdlerise. The originals have lasted for centuries because the patterning is exactly right for young ears.
"Hickory dickory dock — the mouse ran up the what?" (Pause for delighted child to shout "CLOCK!")
That tiny pause-and-fill technique is gold. It turns a passive listener into an active rhyme-detective.
How children actually learn from chants
A child meeting a rhyme for the first time hears the music more than the words. After a few hearings, they start filling in predictable spots — first the rhyming word at the end of a line, then bigger chunks. By the tenth hearing they can chant most of it. By the fiftieth they've absorbed not just the rhyme but dozens of small patterns about how language works: where stress falls, which words rhyme, how syllables break, how meaning rides along on rhythm.
This is why repetition is not boring at this age — it's the point. A two-year-old who wants the same nursery song fourteen times in a row is doing serious linguistic work. Sing it the fourteenth time with the same warmth as the first.
You can speed up the learning by:
- Pausing on rhyming words for them to fill in.
- Doing the hand actions every time. The motor pathway reinforces memory.
- Inventing silly versions. "Itsy bitsy spider climbed up the refrigerator." Children love this and it sharpens their rhyme-detecting ear.
It's also worth knowing that made-up nonsense rhymes are just as good as the classics for phonological awareness. "Boggle, boggle, dingle, dock — the giraffe ran up the clock." The brain doesn't care that "boggle" isn't a word; it cares that you're playing with patterned sound. Daft rhymes invented on a long car ride do real linguistic work.
Practical rhyming tips
- Chant in the car. Long drives, short drives — chants kill the squabbling and build language at the same time.
- Make up nonsense rhymes. "Banana, banana, sat on a what?" Let your child supply the rhyme. The wrong ones are funniest.
- Do bath-time rhyme games. "I'm thinking of a word that rhymes with duck. It's something we did with our hands when we were little." (Hint: clap, no — pluck!)
- Read rhyming picture books daily. Julia Donaldson is a national treasure for this. So are Dr Seuss, Mem Fox, and any modern picture book you find with strong rhythm.
- Sing the alphabet in different tunes. Same letters, different melody — children learn that the letters are the constant and the music is variable.
- Clap syllables. "Let's clap your name. Em-i-ly. Three claps!" This builds syllable awareness, another phonological-awareness sub-skill.
- Don't worry about getting it right. Made-up rhymes count just as much as the famous ones. Your child cares about the warmth, not the source.
How Kluriko helps
Lärspel has rhyme-based games designed for three- to five-year-olds — matching the rhyming pair, filling in the rhyming word, sorting pictures by ending sound. The activities are short (three to five minutes), visually clear, and forgiving of wrong taps, which is what suits this age. They work best as a small supplement to the chanting you do off-screen — the actual rhyme treasury your child carries into school comes from you, not from a screen. Kluriko is meant to be one of many small ingredients in a noisy, song-filled, rhyme-rich household.