Do nursery rhymes help children learn to read?
They seem to help indirectly. Studies have found that young children who know more nursery rhymes tend to get better at hearing the sounds in words, and that skill is closely tied to later reading and spelling.
What the research found
In work led by Morag MacLean, Peter Bryant and Lynette Bradley in the late 1980s, children’s knowledge of nursery rhymes at a little over three years old was linked with their sound skills over the following year or so. Those sound skills seemed to explain the link with reading. This shows a connection, not proof that rhymes alone cause better reading: children who hear many rhymes may also get lots of other language at home.
What to do with that
Make rhymes part of ordinary days and don’t turn them into lessons. Play with the sounds: stop before the rhyming word and let your child fill it in, or swap in a silly word and see if they catch it. “Out came the sun and dried up all the… bun?”