To rhyme, or not to rhyme

I didn’t rhyme the first draft of my children’s book.

I knew most picture books rhymed, but I felt mine was a bit more serious and rhyming wasn’t necessary. I worked on it for over a year and finally got it finished. And I thought it was pretty good. But then, I read it aloud. And I realized that it needed to rhyme after all. So I started over.

It took me another two years to rewrite the book and make it rhyme. And to be honest, rhyming was the hardest part. It’s seems easy to just think of a few words and put them together in a rhyming sort of way (The fox wears socks), but it is a different thing entirely to have a story or philosophy and to try to explain them while rhyming at the same time. Your vocabulary becomes very limited very quickly.

Of course, rhyming is fun, but is that all there is to it? And if it’s really that difficult, why bother rhyming in the first place?

According to the research, rhyming isn’t just for fun. It makes things easier to remember and it appears that rhyming actually makes us smarter.

There are many studies that have proved this throughout the years, but if you don’t have time to read all the journals and just want the short version, take a look at this article from Learning Liftoff. It sums it up pretty well.

https://www.learningliftoff.com/take-the-time-to-rhyme-how-rhyming-benefits-early-education/

#rhymes#rhymingbooks #earlyeducation#memory #cognitivedevelopment#literacy