Nursery rhymes, important in learning to read, falling from favor

Rachel Simpson loves to read to her two children - 5-year-old Rebecca and 5-month-old Benjamin - but she steers clear of nursery rhymes.

"They are scary," said the Cherry Hill mom. Hansel and Gretel get pushed into the oven; the three little pigs are hunted by the big, bad wolf.

"I prefer stories that teach a lesson but aren't scary or violent while they're doing it."

Jessie Menken, owner of children's store Ali's Wagon in Fairmount, doesn't read nursery rhymes to her kids, either. "I think they're really annoying, rhymey and singsongy," she said. "We have so many more choices now in children's literature, with vibrant, colorful pictures."

In a politically correct and parentally hyper world where the old woman who lived in a shoe would likely lose her parental rights, and Georgie Porgie would at least get a time out, a growing number of parents aren't passing down the classics - those short rhyming poems often made into ditties - to their kids. Coupled with the youngest generation's access to the app-wonderlands of iPads and iPhones - few 2-year-olds don't know swipe technology - old-school nursery rhymes seem to be on the outs.

"There's a parental anxiety brought to the nursery rhyme," said Richard Selznick, a psychologist and director of the Cooper Learning Center in Voorhees and author of two books including School Struggles. Parents may deem a rhyme a bit too much (the fate of those blind mice, for instance), and assume it will affect their children negatively.

Yet despite the legion of other kinds of children's entertainment out there - educational TV shows, CDs, learning apps, contemporary books with contemporary themes - many literacy professionals say they aren't enough to compensate. Alliteration, cadence, and rhyming, all heard with a sophisticated vocabulary, are fundamental building blocks of reading, Selznick said.

As kids get older, reading-comprehension problems often are linked to weaknesses with vocabulary, and exposing toddlers to nursery rhymes that are playful with language stimulates those areas of the brain.

Nursery rhymes also are important in developing phonemic awareness, which allows for perceiving and manipulating sounds within words. Take the three sounds that form the word cat, for example. Rhyming shows how to remove a sound and replace it with another - say, cat to bat).

"Kids who can't do that usually have later trouble with reading," Selznick said.

Yet with students expected to know more at an earlier age, the pressure is on to ditch nursery rhymes for denser texts.

" 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star' won't get you to pass a standardized test," said Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, an associate professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania. "The age range when kids are supposed to be reading picture books has shrunk because we want to get them to chapter books in first grade."

Menken, mother to Lily, 7, and Abe, 4, acknowledges there is value in nursery rhymes - fairy tales, myths, and fables are a big component of what's taught at the Waldorf School of Philadelphia, where Lily attends.

"I think it's really important and compensates for what we haven't given her," she acknowledged. But she believes other rhyming books, such as Dr. Seuss, do the trick.

In Menken's store, the hottest sellers for the preschool set are black-and-white board books and books that toddler hands can use actively, including pop-outs and finger puppets.

"Kids are supposed to always be learning now," she reasoned, "and these books give babies a head start toward reading" - moving their eyes from left to right on the page, associating pictures with spoken words, .using their imagination.

Yet Jonni Wolskee, reading specialist at East Dover Elementary School in Delaware and coauthor of Making the Most of Your Core Reading Program, insists they aren't the same. "Dr. Seuss stories tend to be nonsensical and lack rich vocabulary words," she said.

They're also texts that get read beyond babyhood, whereas nursery rhymes - very short and traditionally not book-based - can be introduced much earlier.

"They are a building block that the rest of literature is built upon," said Sarah Stippich, children's librarian at the Free Library of Philadelphia. "Like Shakespeare, they're classics."

During her 10 years as a kindergarten teacher, Wolskee has been surprised to discover how few of her students had been exposed to nursery rhymes - these days, only about one-quarter.

"I would ask the kids if they'd heard particular nursery rhymes before, and I'd get a lot of blank stares," she said.

The slow death of nursery rhymes is a trend the Philadelphia schools would like to reverse. Although the district once allowed individual teachers to decide whether nursery rhymes were part of a curriculum, teachers in prekindergarten classrooms this year will be encouraged to incorporate rhymes more, as research is recognizing their value. As a social tool, children can share the rhymes they memorize with others - singing, reciting, or acting them out as a group, explained Joy Diljohn, executive director of pre-K Head Start in the School District of Philadelphia.

At the Free Library of Philadelphia, nursery rhymes are still an important component of the library's daily story hours.

"We are on the front lines with the parents as the ones promoting nursery rhymes, encouraging them to sing and rhyme with their babies as much as possible," Stippich said. "These are scientifically proven ways to build these preliteracy skills for babies."

Librarians suggest parents take out nursery rhyme books, especially those that reflect their community. "My favorite is The Neighborhood Mother Goose by Nina Crews because it's photograph collages of city kids paired with traditional nursery rhymes," Stippich said.

Traditional nursery rhymes also offer a sentimental connection to the past. At the Collingswood Book Trader, a store where people buy and sell back their books, owner Mary Alice Curley said she doesn't sell many rhyming books, but when people do buy them, they keep them instead of bringing them back in for credit. "It's nostalgia, they want to pass them on to their children and grandchildren," she said.

Stella Goodmond, a Philadelphia grandmother of five children ranging in age from 3 to 16, owns a number of nursery rhyme books she reads to them while her daughters work and go to school.

"My 3-year-old grandson loves them."