Children grow up with rhymes and develop their first language by them. Apart from being the most important spoken language, rhymes are the first experienced parts of communication in the children’s mother tongue. They listen and react to nursery rhymes and finger games spoken and often acted by their parents. They go to sleep with lullabies sung by their closest care-givers or try to imitate little rhymes by babbling. So they play an important role in the process of learning and using the mother tongue. Rhymes are also an essential part of foreign language learning for young learners, basically because all children enjoy saying rhymes in their native language and they will naturally enjoy doing the same in another language. The value of using rhymes in the primary English teaching classroom has been widely recognized. More and more teachers are now using them in their teaching. In this paper we describe the importance of using rhymes in teaching English as a foreign language in the primary school. Beside these theoretical points, we give practical advices how to teach rhymes.

Children grow up with rhymes and develop their first language by them. Apart from being the most important spoken language, rhymes are the first experienced parts of communication in the children’s mother tongue. They listen and react to nursery rhymes and finger games spoken and often acted by their parents. They go to sleep with lullabies sung by their closest care-givers or try to imitate little rhymes by babbling. So they play an important role in the process of learning and using the mother tongue. Rhymes are also an essential part of foreign language learning for young learners, basically because all children enjoy saying rhymes in their native language and they will naturally enjoy doing the same in another language. The value of using rhymes in the primary English teaching classroom has been widely recognized. More and more teachers are now using them in their teaching. In this paper we describe the importance of using rhymes in teaching English as a foreign language in the primary school. Beside these theoretical points, we give practical advices how to teach rhymes.