Most kindergarten readiness checklists lean heavily on early literacy skills like recognizing letters and beginning sounds in words, connecting letters to their sounds, and identifying or producing rhymes. At a glance, these expectations can seem daunting to parents of incoming kindergartners.
But there’s a simple practice to boost early literacy skills that dates back thousands of years, involves no special training, can take place anywhere, and is almost guaranteed to elicit laughter and mimicry from young children: reciting nursery rhymes.
“They’re almost brilliant in their simplicity, and their ability to engage kids,” said W. Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research. “When we don’t incorporate those into our early childhood programs, we lose this accumulated implicit knowledge of how to support our children’s development effectively.”
But nursery rhymes, which once dominated downtime for families of young children, are fading from popular culture. Fewer students enter school knowing them, experts say. And while data on their usage in early education is sparse, anecdotal evidence suggests they are no longer part of preschool or kindergarten curricula either.
Here’s a closer look at why, and what’s at stake with their decline.
How nursery rhymes hook kids on language
Sung or chanted, the verses in nursery rhymes easily stick with young listeners. So too do their sophisticated vocabulary words, when presented in rhythmic and often silly lines, like this verse from the traditional English lullaby-turned-nursery rhyme:
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are.
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.
“Children are naturally attuned to rhythm and to language,” said Sufia Alamgir, an Australia-based reading and language specialist. “Nursery rhymes provide an avenue for not only enjoyable language experiences, but also learning patterns, tone, words, and vocabulary in a way that kids learn most readily.”
Alamgir said that in recent years she’s noticed a significant decline in students knowing rhymes or other culturally significant songs.
“Kids are exposed to music through the media, but they are not necessarily singing at school. It sort of quietly disappeared, and I just don’t see it anymore,” she said.
Teachers are reading less to students
Nor do teachers necessarily read aloud to students in school, even in the early grades.
In 2024, fewer than a quarter of students in the United Kingdom ages 5-10 received daily story time at school for pleasure’s sake, according to the Farshore and HarperCollins Children’s Books Annual Review of Children’s Reading for Pleasure, 2025. Many early elementary classrooms in U.S. schools appear to follow a similar pattern.
While there’s no reliable way to measure how frequently teachers read aloud to young students, literacy blocks in early grades tend to be highly regulated periods that some teachers say offer little time for read-alouds.
For instance, researchers from the nonprofit SERP Institute (Strategic Education Research Partnership) spent more than 80 hours during the 2021-22 school year observing literacy blocks in 42 K-2 classrooms across six schools in a midsized, mid-Atlantic district. They found that 25% of instructional time was dedicated to phonics, 25% to whole-class comprehension instruction, and 50% to small-group instruction.
Although reading aloud in class is rarely prioritized in many early elementary classrooms, experts praise its benefits.
“I would argue that, of all components [of reading], read-alouds have one of the longest-standing research bases. There’s a lot of data showing the power of read-alouds,” Molly Ness, a former teacher, reading researcher, and vice president of academic content at Learning Ally, a nonprofit volunteer organization that supports educators, told EdWeek.
Decades-old data supports Ness’ argument. In 1985, The Commission on Reading declared read-alouds “the single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading.” A 1983 study explored the power of nursery rhymes as a precursor skill for literacy development. A 2009 study found that children’s knowledge of nursery rhymes at age 3 predicted later success in reading and spelling. Additionally, a 2012 study showed that adding a music component to nursery rhymes significantly improved kindergarten students’ verbal memory.
Why parents don’t share nursery rhymes like they used to
Schools aren’t solely responsible for introducing read-alouds to children. The American Academy of Pediatrics encourages families to engage in “shared reading” from birth through kindergarten at least. Yet fewer parents are reading aloud to kids, whether nursery rhymes or other texts.
Some place the blame on increased screen time. Forty percent of children have their own personal tablet by age 2, and nearly 25% of 8-year-olds own a cellphone, according to a 2025 national report by Common Sense Media. As screen time increases, it edges out time for shared reading at home.
In a 2025 nationally representative survey by HarperCollins UK, less than half (41%) of U.K. parents surveyed said they read frequently to their children ages 4 and younger—down from 64% in 2012. Just 36% of parents with children 5 to 7 years regularly read to their kids.
Nursery rhymes are no longer popular with many parents, either. In a 2009 survey of 2,500 parents by the UK-based nonprofit Booktrust, 25% of respondents said they’d never sung a nursery rhyme to their child; 33% said nursery rhymes were too old-fashioned to share with their children.
It’s also possible that today’s parents weren’t exposed to nursery rhymes as children, so they are less likely to pass them down. Some parents who do remember nursery rhymes say they find them too scary or otherwise inappropriate to share with young children. Alamgir, the reading specialist, said she experienced this backlash firsthand when she attempted to teach nursery rhymes to children at a public school where she previously taught.
So for now, countless children will be likely to grasp phonemic awareness through systematic explicit reading instruction rather than by hearing and repeating tongue-twisting nursery rhymes, education researchers suggest. They’ll also be less likely to fall asleep wondering why the dish ran away with the spoon, or formulating mental images of twinkling stars as bright as diamonds.
Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, laments these changes. “There’s valuable knowledge in these traditions we do with our kids that we don’t want to lose.”
