Last night, after a day spent outside playing hard and absently sucking on her mittens all the while, Miss S. entered the house with bright eyes, flushed cheeks, and hands the tincture of beet root.
“Mom,” she said, partly as a question, partly as a confessional, holding out her hands. I saw that they were red, but not frostbitten. “Go take a shower,” I told her. “That will warm you up.”
A little while later, she reemerged downstairs in layers of warm polar fleece—her pink polka-dotted footie pajamas, red penguin robe, and a pink skiing hat with ballet slippers on it, which she reclaimed as a ‘sleeping cap’ after having Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Night Before Christmas” read to her at school. “I’m done!” she exclaimed.
I looked up at her from where I stood, preparing dinner. “Did you moisturize your skin after your shower?”
“No. . . I forgot.”
I shook my head slightly. “Your skin needs to be taken care of honey, especially during the dry winter. You should be moisturizing it twice a day.”
“So you’re saying that I need lotion,” S. said with emphasis, slightly exasperated at the way in which I seemed to be talking around things.
I smiled at her knowingly, having decided to bring it down a notch. “Twice a day would be the potion. . . at the very least, that’s my notion.”
After a brief, thoughtful pause, the great Miss S. flashed a confident smile and stepped up to the plate. “Oh yes, I see. It stops erosion!”
I laughed explosively at my own surprise. “That’s right! I suppose it does! Now get yourself in motion and go take care of the skin you’re in.”
It was the summer of her third birthday when we began playing this game. One afternoon, after a day of tinkering in and around the garden, we sat on the stoop by our side door drinking lemonade. As we luxuriated in the sun, we somehow began carrying on our first Seussical style conversation in rhyme.
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| To prime a child's mind for rhyme play, reading Dr. Seuss beginner books together is very helpful! |
“The cat sat on the mat.” S. declared wryly.
“Oh, yes, but so did the rat.” I replied.
She giggled. “The mailman is very fat.”
“Drat! This book is flat!” I tossed back.
At first our rhyming game went on like this, consisting primarily of an exchange of simple descriptive declarations and questions. Each of us in turn would come up with a statement with a new word in the rhyme sequence, until we’d exhausted them all.[1]
As she got older, we continued to flex our rhyming muscles, but with an important difference: the rhyming became incorporated into a string of narratively related sequences such as this one: “Grandma has a beautiful dog.”; “It seems to be chasing a hopping frog.”; “Is the frog sitting on a log?”; “I’m not sure . . . I can’t see it through the fog.”
At the age of seven, S. is able to rhyme her way in and out of an everyday conversation such as the one we had last night. She does it with the ease of Sam-I-am, or any of the many alliteratively-minded Dr. Seuss characters we love. We still favor an end-term rhyme scheme, and haven’t really touched on any other forms of metrical rhythm such as internal rhyme, but that will come. The exchanges are always fantastically silly and delightfully fun for both of us . . . a little ritual that we alone share.
On equal footing in terms of value, conversations like these are building her vocabulary, helping her to discern the meanings of words through the context of their use, and helping her identify phonetic elements, the last of which will make her a stronger reader and speller in the long run. And additionally, she is cultivating an appreciation for the expressive qualities of language, for the ways in which it serves as a tool of lyric appreciation.
[1] For kids who are less interested in just having a playful conversation than physical play, a parent might use the rhyming in conjunction with throwing or rolling a ball back and forth, or tossing a frisbee. I suspect with my 2 year old, who can’t sit still for five seconds, induction in our rhyme game might take this form!
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