A Rhyming Zone in our Eynsham Nursery

Beata (Eynsham Setting’s Lead for Quality Teaching) has been developing a new Rhyming Zone in the Kindergarten room. Our Rhyming Zone has lots of bags with nursery rhymes or poems each with relevant props, some that we can make with the children at nursery.

Each month, we choose a poem to learn with the children. The children really enjoy using props to act out their favourite poems. Recently we have been learning the poem called “A Rhyming Calendar”. We made headbands with pictures depicting each month to present the poem to other children.

We shared the poem with parents, giving out copies of the poem to take home and encouraged our parents to create their own poems with the children at home. We are delighted that the children are still bringing in poems composed at home with their parents. This in turn has led us to use these poems to create a lovely Poetry Book.

The children are very proud of their poems and they enjoy listening to them again and again.

The children love our Rhyming Zone. They are having great fun while developing their understanding of rhythm and rhyme at the same time. Both rhythm and rhyme help children hear the sounds and syllables in words, which are important skills for later reading development.

Nursery rhymes and poems are a great way of introducing new vocabulary and an effective way of learning how words and phrases are put together. Using props while learning nursery rhymes and poems also helps young children to focus and keep them engaged.