I had a parent pull me aside once, half-laughing, a little apologetic. Her daughter was four, and she had just caught herself spending twenty minutes going through Incy Wincy Spider, Humpty Dumpty, and Baa Baa Black Sheep before bed. “Am I wasting time?” she asked. “She could be doing something more educational.”

I have thought about that question a lot since then. Because the honest answer is that she was doing something more educational. She just didn’t know it yet.

Nursery rhymes have a reputation problem. They look like entertainment. They sound like nothing more than a pleasant way to pass the time with a small child. And so parents who are genuinely invested in their child’s early learning sometimes feel a little guilty spending time on them, as though they are choosing fun over learning.

What they are actually choosing is one of the single most powerful things they can do to prepare a young child’s brain for reading.

What rhyme does to the reading brain

To understand why nursery rhymes matter so much, it helps to understand what reading actually requires at the very beginning.

Before a child can decode a written word, they need to be able to hear the sounds inside spoken words. Not just hear them in the way we all hear sounds, but actually notice them, pull them apart, play with them. They need to hear that “cat” and “hat” share something at the end. That “dog” and “dig” share something at the beginning. That clapping has two beats in it and elephant has three.

This sensitivity to the sounds inside words is called phonological awareness, and it is one of the strongest predictors of how easily a child will learn to read. Children who arrive at school with strong phonological awareness tend to pick up reading noticeably more easily than those who don’t. It’s not about intelligence. It’s about whether their ear has been trained to notice what words are made of.

Nursery rhymes train that ear. Every time a child hears “Jack and Jill went up the hill” and feels that small, satisfying click of “Jill” and “hill” landing in the same sonic place, something is happening in their brain. They are learning that words have patterns. That sounds can be predicted. That language is not just a stream of noise but something with structure, with shape, with rhythm you can feel before you can name. My own child does the “round and round, round and round” thing that Wheels on the Bus has.

That click, repeated hundreds of times across hundreds of rhymes and songs over years of childhood, is building the foundation that reading sits on.

Why it works before children can read a single word

One of the things I love most about nursery rhymes is how early they begin to work. A toddler who cannot identify a single letter and has no idea what “reading” means is still building phonological awareness every time they clap along to a rhyme, anticipate the end of a verse, or burst in with the last word before you’ve finished saying it.

That anticipation, the four-year-old who shouts “HAT” before you reach the end of “The cat sat on the…” is not just showing off. They are demonstrating that their ear has already noticed the pattern. They know what comes next because the sound rhymes, because the rhythm demands it. They don’t have a word for what they just did. But they did something genuinely sophisticated, something that will matter when they are sitting in front of their first reading book six months or a year from now.

Research consistently shows that a child’s familiarity with nursery rhymes in the preschool years is one of the strongest early indicators of how well they will handle reading in their first years of school. It’s not because nursery rhymes teach letters or sounds directly. It’s because they teach the ear. And a well-trained ear is what makes learning letters and sounds possible.

The rhythm matters too

It’s not just the rhyme. The rhythm in nursery rhymes does its own quiet work.

When children clap along, bounce to the beat, or feel the pulse of a verse in their body, they are learning something about syllables without anyone ever having to explain what a syllable is. “Hump-ty Dump-ty sat on a wall” has a beat, and that beat maps onto the natural breaks in the word. Children who have spent years singing and chanting and bouncing to that kind of rhythm arrive at school with an instinctive feel for where words break apart that makes sounding out much more intuitive.

This is why speech therapists, reading specialists, and early childhood teachers have consistently valued rhyme and song as tools. It’s not sentimentality. It’s understanding how the hearing brain prepares itself for the reading brain.

What this means at home

You don’t need to turn nursery rhyme time into a lesson. In fact, please don’t. The moment you sit a child down and say “now we’re going to do nursery rhymes for your phonological development,” you’ve lost the thread entirely. The whole point is that nursery rhymes work because they are enjoyable, because children want to repeat them, because the repetition feels like fun and not like work.

What you can do is simply make them a part of life. Sing them in the car. Say them at bath time. Let a child interrupt you with the last word of every line. Read the ones with strong rhyme patterns out loud with expression, pausing just before the rhyme so they can fill it in. Clap the rhythm. Let them clap it back. Let a silly rhyme make everyone laugh.

Read them picture book versions of old rhymes. Get a good anthology and leave it somewhere accessible. Don’t make it special occasion reading, make it Tuesday morning reading, Friday afternoon reading, the-dentist-waiting-room reading.

If they have favourites, repeat them endlessly. A child who asks to hear Hickory Dickory Dock for the eleventh time this week is not bored and testing your patience. They are doing exactly what their brain needs: hearing it again, internalizing it more deeply, building one more layer of that foundation.

The most educational thing can also be the most enjoyable

To go back to the mum who asked me whether she was wasting time: no. She was not wasting time.

She was sitting with her daughter in the last hour before sleep, saying words that are hundreds of years old, watching a small face light up at the same moment every time the rhyme landed. And underneath that lightness, something was being built. Something quiet and invisible and important.

It is not always the activities that look most educational that do the most work. Sometimes it’s the ones that feel most like joy.

Written by a classroom teacher and mum who still knows every verse of Humpty Dumpty and does not apologize for it.

If you are looking for playful, low-pressure activities that continue building the kind of language awareness nursery rhymes start, my printable activity packs for ages 3 to 6 are in my Etsy shop, designed to feel more like play than practice. And if your child is starting to put sounds and words together and move toward early reading, I have sight words and early reading books on Amazon, made for the very beginning of that journey. Both are on the website.