Being able to hear and produce rhyming words is a stepping stone on the way to learning phonics. Children must be able to discern the smaller units of sounds in words when they later try to "sound out words." Reading and teaching young children nursery rhymes helps them to develop phonological awareness. To learn more about phonological awareness read: Phonological awareness: instructional and assessment guidelines by David J. Chard and Shirley V. Dickson (1999)

The great thing about the traditional nursery rhymes in The Neighborhood Mother Goose by Nina Crews is that it has contemporary photos of diverse children in urban settings acting out the rhymes. Free of the ethnocentric bias of many versions of Mother Goose, here preschoolers will see pictures of people like themselves, doing the things they like to do.