Did you know that you’re pretty much a genius for signing up for my weekly emails? Yeah, you are. : )
You are because these songs and videos that I send out to you may seem like mere entertainment for your little one – but they are honestly much, much more. In fact, today, by receiving this email and sharing this video with your child, you get an A+ in parenting. Woohoo!
This week’s video “Planting a Tree” is a fun rhyme, chant and finger play about planting a tree and how it grows.
Aside from being a fun and catchy way to teach young children about the life cycle of trees and plants that involves fine and gross motor skills – it, like all rhymes, is a building block toward literacy.
Yep – teaching your child rhymes now helps them with their reading later! (See. You ARE a genius!)
Learning rhymes helps promote phonological awareness. Phonological awareness is defined as “an individual’s awareness of the sound structure, of words and is an important and reliable predictor of later reading ability” according to researchers.*
Giving children our attention, talking to them, reading to them, singing, playing and and looking at them while we communicate with them are all incredibly important activities – all of which will help with speech and brain development and, therefore, early literacy skills. (This is why it’s extremely important to put you phone away while you’re engaging with your child….)
And additionally – rhyming is fun! And the more fun something is, the more we do it. (It’s no coincidence that nearly everyone single one of Dr. Suess’s books are popular!) The more your children rhyme and repeat those rhymes, the more their speech and literacy skills develop.
This particular rhyme “Planting a Tree” has a really fun cadence to it, a lot or repetition, some silly sound effects and movement. I’ve been doing it in my classes for the last couple of weeks, and they love it. They catch on to it and memorize it quickly, and love doing it over and over again. Faster, slower, louder, softer – it’s a blast!
So – press play and join your child in learning this fun, move-along rhyme!
AND – enjoy feeling really good about yourself and your parenting choices.
If you’d like to share photos or videos of your child (and you?!) doing this rhyme, I’d love to see them! You can share in the comments below or over on my Facebook Page.
Enjoy, have a wonderful Tuesday and I’ll “see” you next week!
xoxo
Miss Nina
*according to the Wikipedia article on Phonological Awareness.
