Singing at the Top of Their Lungs

My daughters love to sing nursery rhymes at the top of their lungs. They do it in the bathroom, while playing with toys, and when walking through the house for no particular reason at all. And when they're singing, they can be loud, and I don't mean "isn't that cute" loud. I mean "I can hear you through two closed doors" kind of loud.

There are some afternoons when I try to tune them out. And then there are other times I realize I'm singing right along with them, just as loud or even louder.

Bath Time and Bedtime

To be honest, all of this singing started when they were younger. I sang to them constantly when they were babies: "ABCs" at bath time, "Twinkle Twinkle" before bed, "Itsy Bitsy Spider" whenever things got fussy, "Wheels on the Bus" in the car, "Old MacDonald" on the way to school. The list goes on and on...

The songs are so deeply ingrained from my own childhood that I sang them without even thinking about it. They've been in my head my whole life because someone sang them to me when I was small.

I think this is just how nursery rhymes work: they pass from one generation to the next without anyone making a conscious decision to teach them. You sing them to your kids because your parents sang them to you, and the whole thing feels automatic.

The Sounds Inside Words

At some point I started wondering how nursery rhymes might help with learning and development, or if they're just songs we sing because our parents sang them to us.

It turns out they do. When kids hear rhymes over and over, they start picking up on the sounds inside words. Every time they sing "Baa Baa Black Sheep, have you any wool," their brain is noticing that "wool" and "full" share a sound, and that the song has a pattern they can predict. That ear for sound patterns is one of the first things kids need before they can learn to read, and researchers call it phonological awareness.^[1] Kids who grow up hearing lots of rhymes tend to have an easier time when they start sounding out words.

So all that singing in the bathtub at 7pm, while I'm trying to rinse soap out of someone's hair? Apparently that was helping them prepare to read!

Rhythm in the Pool

Nursery rhymes show up in other places too.

In the girls' swim class, the coach uses songs like "Row Row Row Your Boat" to teach freestyle arm strokes. The kids sing the song and move their arms in time with the melody, and the rhythm gives them something to organize the physical movement around. Instead of trying to remember when to pull and when to reach, they just follow the beat of a song they've known since they were babies.

I watched this from the pool deck and thought about how many times I'd sung that exact song in the bathtub. That same melody that once kept them entertained at bath time is now teaching them to pull through water.

Keep Singing

So, if your kids are at the age where you're regularly singing nursery rhymes to them, or if your kids are a little older and every trip to the bathroom comes with a full-volume performance, those songs are doing more than filling the quiet. They're working on their reading readiness, their coordination, and likely other things we don't realize. Keep singing those songs, even when they come back at you through two closed doors.