Nursery World - Picturebooks 3

Poetry has great developmental importance for children, and rhyming picturebooks are a great way to introduce it, finds Andy McCormack

Lullabies and nursery rhymes are, for most of us, our very first experience with stories. They are a universal phenomenon: documented across the continents and throughout history. They are an almost organic response in adults faced with a crying infant, and provide a rhythm of words to match, or echo, the rhythm of shushing a baby.

The developmental benefits of singing to very young children are indisputable, but why this should be so has been the subject of much academic research. Morag Styles, the first professor of children’s poetry at the University of Cambridge, described how ‘children are hard-wired to musical language’. Professor Karen Coats, her successor as head of the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at Cambridge, describes how the rhythm of poetry, repetition and rhyme create a means for children to feel safe and protected by language in the same way they could once feel safe and protected by being rocked.

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