Section outline

  • Nursery rhymes are the first poetry (or literature) that children come across. While rhymes in the mother tongue are mostly for small children up to the pre-school age, nursery rhymes in English can be used with pupils at primary school. Their simple language, clear rhythm, and the broad choice of themes that range from parts of the body through animals, alphabet, counting, days of the week, months and seasons, food to daily routine, make them useful authentic material in the English class.

    Opal Dunn said: "Learning rhymes is an enjoyable and quick method of learning English. .... Some proof of its effectiveness can be seen in the number of adults of different nationalities, who have forgoten most of the English they learned at schoo, but can still, with great pride, recite without fault English rhymes they learned during their school days."