All over the world, nursery rhymes are known because we learnt them when were children. Sometimes, these songs or poems have not a meaningful sense but students can enjoy with them. But…It is very important to reflect about how we can use nursery rhymes in a classroom. Are they useful for students?

Nursery rhymes were created during the middle ages. They were focused on expressing popular traditions, political ideas, social critiques or historical events. They were changing along the time and nowadays, they can be used in our classrooms.

There are a lot of popular nursery rhymes created, specially, for education. Moreover, there are some of them that are specifically related with some courses such as Science or Mathematics. However, all of us are able to modify and refine these rhymes to achieve better ones or to deal with the contents we want.

Furthermore, nursery rhymes are implicitly working on multiple intelligences. Most of these poems, are carried out through a kind of choreographies or gestures. What does it mean? Rhymes are dealing with kinesthetic, musical or linguistic intelligences, and this is an aspect really productive for teachers, since they need to adapt their way of teaching to the characteristics of the group.

Nevertheless, it is important to underline that nursery rhymes are part of children’s literature so they are not focused just in teaching contents. According to Scott-Tennent “the interest of this literature resides in its qualities”.  This kind of poems contain catchy characters, motivating arguments and easy and repetitive structures. All of these features can make the students be involved in the lessons and they also facilitate the learning.

In conclusion, literature is more than novels and authors. We can stimulate our students to be interested on reading and writing since they are young. There are a lot of different ways to encourage children in this subject and, nursery rhymes can be a good one.  We should know how to manage the classroom, taking into account our pupils individually because, all of them are different. So, the most important aspect is that we have to be aware of the amount of different resources we have at our disposal and how and why we use them.

Now, It is your time!! Let me challenge you!! You have to create a short nursery rhyme that includes any content of Primary. As all the challenges, I have created the first. I hope you like it. (Rhythm: “London bridge is falling down”):

“Moon is our satellite, satellite, satellite

Moon is our satellite..in Solar System.

Sun is our main star, main star, main star

Sun is our main star, in Solar System.

Earth is the planet we live, where we live, where we live

Earth is the planet we live, in Solar System.”

Here you can find a collection of nursery rhymes and how to develop them in a classroom:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_IP1YcAdG4&list=PL6B76736EE0EBA544

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtYnT0786SQ