Teaching rhymes in the classroom
Teaching nursery rhymes is one of the strategic tasks every teacher should know. The best way to teach rhymes is to used cards in the sense that they can concentrate on the rhyme and nothing else. It also gives the students a sense of belonging. You can separate them into small groups so that they won’t play too much during the time of learning. Secondly, it will help you the teacher to know who is reciting the rhyme and who is not. With nursery rhymes, narrative, story telling, song, and dance all go hand in hand. Story telling should accompany the teaching of rhymes so to avoid students being bored easily. Narrative stories that interest students are very important. It keeps the class lively and alert when needed. Phonics, on the other hand, is required for students to be able to recite rhymes well. The students need to be able to pronounce words in the rhyme very well before they can recite them along with the teacher. Big words that are difficult to pronounce can be written on the board for students to learn. Experience is the best teacher!
In the same way, if students will be able to store what they learn into their long-term memory and be able to retrieve them at the appropriate time, they need motor skills to practice what they learn in the classroom. As I said earlier on, rhymes can be written on cards and distributed to the students so they can hold it, move it around and visualize the words clearly. This will facilitate the ability to process what they learn and be able to remember them in the future.
Benefits of rhymes
Rhymes improve the pronunciation skills of students because before they recite the rhyme along with their teacher they must learn how to pronounce the difficult words. Breaking up classrooms into groups helps them to relate to each other and as well learn from one another. Rhymes help them to be independent in the sense that whenever they get home on their leisure time they can recite them on their own without any instruction from anyone.