Whether we are parents or teachers, how can we best help the children we relate with learn key skills they need for literacy and basic math?

Judy Bowers has developed a series of learning support resources that inject a lot of fun and play into absorbing those fundamentals. Rondo Fun Time! uses poetry, marching, dancing and sign language in lessons for pre-school through grade-school children. Kids naturally love to learn with these activities that engage repetition, rhythm, and rhyme!

Actually, we adults are far more familiar with those “rhythm, rhyme, and repetition” elements of core learning than we might think at first. Ask how to spell “Mississippi,” and how many of us will automatically go “MiSs-Iss-Ipp-I”? Ask to recite the children’s rhyme about Mary and her pet, and we “know” the regular rhythm of English goes like this: MAry HAD a LITtle LAMB … Or start off this folk song: “She’ll be comin’ ’round the mountain ….” and ask people to sing the next few lines.

We may not know or remember relevant technical terms like prosody, or iambic tetrameter, or assonance, or ostinato — but we’re intuitively aware of them. In fact, we use them every single day in our communications. So, why shouldn’t we teach kids to learn the most, in ways that they learn best?

What if we passed on the cornerstones of everyday concepts that kids need for life by intentionally using the fun tools of rhythm, rhyme, and repetition? That’s the inspiration behind Rondo Fun Time! Each volume presents carefully scripted “learning moments” that combine not just rhythm, rhyme, and repetition, but three modalities of learning that are core to helping us remember: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Each learning moment draws from the activity set of reciting simple poems, clapping in time, singing, dancing, and sign language. So, each simultaneously engages what kids see, what they hear, and ways they feel movement. All of these elements together make learning moments more memorable!