Effect of Nursery Rhymes on Emergent Literacy Development in a Kindergarten Classroom

Abstract

Students are expected to become emergent readers by the end of kindergarten, yet some students begin kindergarten lacking the emergent literacy skills needed to become readers. As a teacher, I need to know what I can do in the classroom to help these children gain the skills they need while still teaching the required curriculum. During this study, students were frequently exposed to nursery rhymes for six weeks in the classroom. Instruction was delivered on speech to text matching, rhyming, initial sounds, syllables, and segmenting through shared reading, small group, and individual instruction. Students participated in pre/post assessments that measured their knowledge of phonological awareness, alphabetic knowledge, and concepts of print skills. Each area of the pre/post assessment showed an increase in skill with an average growth of 15% for alphabetic knowledge, 21% for phonological awareness, and 28% for concepts of print. This study has shown that at the beginning of the year, six weeks of frequent use of nursery rhymes in the kindergarten classroom can contribute to helping students increase their emergent reading skills, despite their prior knowledge and exposure to literacy.