Effect of Nursery Rhymes on Emergent Literacy Development in a Kindergarten Classroom
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Date
2017-11-13Author
Hunter, Theresa
Advisor(s)
Pollack, Hilary
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Show full item recordAbstract
Students are expected to become emergent readers by the end of kindergarten, yet
some students begin kindergarten lacking the emergent literacy skills needed to
become readers. As a teacher, I need to know what I can do in the classroom to help
these children gain the skills they need while still teaching the required curriculum.
During this study, students were frequently exposed to nursery rhymes for six weeks in
the classroom. Instruction was delivered on speech to text matching, rhyming, initial
sounds, syllables, and segmenting through shared reading, small group, and individual
instruction. Students participated in pre/post assessments that measured their
knowledge of phonological awareness, alphabetic knowledge, and concepts of print
skills. Each area of the pre/post assessment showed an increase in skill with an
average growth of 15% for alphabetic knowledge, 21% for phonological awareness, and
28% for concepts of print. This study has shown that at the beginning of the year, six
weeks of frequent use of nursery rhymes in the kindergarten classroom can contribute
to helping students increase their emergent reading skills, despite their prior knowledge
and exposure to literacy.