Top Five Songs for Language Development

Speech Therapy Nivanka R Nishanth May 1, 2021

The classic nursery rhymes which have been sung through the generations are considered to be the best songs for language development. Singing nursery rhymes to babies and toddlers would facilitate them to be aware of and imitate novel sounds, build vocabulary, be creative and improve their language memory.

Usually, actions are incorporated in these rhymes to develop their motor coordination skills. It’s best to use these rhymes in their day-to-day routines.

Here are the best songs and tips to develop language along with music:

Humpty Dumpty:

This is one of the first rhymes that they will learn. To make it fun, you can sing this song by keeping a toy, Humpty, on the chair and then, express concern that he might fall from the chair at the end of the song. You can give this song a happy ending by adding a second verse. By doing so, it would encourage them to pick him up and pacify him. They would build their vocabulary by learning words such as fall, down, got hurt, pick up, don’t cry and fix.

Head Shoulders Knees and toes:

This song helps them to learn their gross body parts, which is considered to be a great receptive language skills for toddlers. Its also improves their coordination and imitation skills. You can sing the song slowly until they master the skill of pointing their gross body parts correctly. To make it fun, you can speed it up until it ends in a silly mess of pointing.

Row your Boat:

First, make them to sit opposite to you and also hold their hands. Sing this song by moving their arms back and forth. Pause frequently and wait for them to give you a cue (such as jerk action or any action or words such as more or row row) to continue with the song. When you sing the line “if you see a crocodile don’t forget to, pause and cue them to scream “ah” by throwing your hands up.

If you’re happy and you know it:

This rhyme helps them to learn emotions and action verbs. You can teach emotions to toddlers by making them to imitate exaggerated faces such as happy/angry/scared/sad etc.. After singing the song, you can discuss with them about they have felt these emotions.

This song will facilitate the preschoolers to learn action verbs, follow the directions or commands and improve their imitation skills.

The wheels on the Bus:

Initially you can improve toddlers’ verbal and non verbal initiation skills by singing this song. Then gradually, pause and wait for them to fill in using sounds such as shshsh or action words such as beep or open and close etc.

Once they master this, make this song more challenging by asking them what action should we do next. The preschoolers can get creative by coming up with novel things that can happen while travelling on the bus. By doing so, it would improve their creativity and expanding their sentence length.