ABSTRACT
It is important look back to the early years to see where children’s relationships with language develop. Story is an important early influence, but poetry exists as an even earlier feature of many children’s first steps towards language acquisition. Nursery rhymes are an early introduction to many features of the English language. They are selfcontained, offering the child a (typically humorous) snippet of language that is worth remembering and through repetition the child learns to share the poetic structure with others. Children learn to invest rhyme with emphasis, for example ‘Ring-A-Ring-OfRoses’ ends with the phrase ‘all fall DOWN’, which the child learns to accentuate by intonation and by literally falling down. Similarly, the rhyme:
teaches the child anticipation, turn-taking, humour, the joy of a shared fragment of language. There are close links here with communal songs and sto-ries, but poetry has the particularly important feature (at this stage) of brevity: it is manageable and memorable.
