Rhyme, Rhythm, and Repetition

Mem Fox, author of popular children's books such as Two Little Monkeys and Time for Bed, will be the opening keynoter on November 7 at NAEYC's Annual Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.  In an interview with NAEYC, Fox made these observations about children's books:

"Rhyme, rhythm, and repetition are incredibly important in books for small children.  Repetition and rhythm probably even more than rhyme. All of those three elements are mesmerizing for a start.  When children are born, they’ve been used to the mother’s heartbeat in the womb.  When they’re born, they’re rocked and cradled.  There is the rhythm of life itself.  There’s rhythm in the nursery rhymes and songs that are sung to children very early on.  And those rhythms and rhymes and repetitions morph into children’s books, which are like a bridge from spoken language to the written language.  The repetition, rhyme, and rhythm in written language then morphs into more normal language.  It’s like a stage of learning.

"I’ve said all of that as a writer, but I’m a teacher as well.  As an educator, I know that if children cannot learn the skill of predicting what’s going to come next in language, they can’t learn to read.  They have to know what’s coming next in a sentence.  They have to expect what’s going to be the next word or the next phrase.  Otherwise they might read a sentence as, 'He galloped away on his house.'  He or she might not know that doesn’t make sense.  But a child who can read 'galloped' will know that it’s going to be horse next and not house.  The child can predict what it’s going to be.  So a child can predict the next word and then check it with the print."

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