Using nursery rhymes and light verse for sentence stress (1)

To introduce stress, you will need suitable materials. English speaking children are taught nursery rhymes, which give them excellent practice.

Before giving materials to your students, you need to be familiar with what they can offer. We now suggest that you practise saying the texts in the download sheet below. If you are a non-native speaker, you might like to underline the stressed words on page 1, and check your choices against the stress patterns shown on page 2.

As suggested in the previous video, go through some practice cycles with these texts. 

Alternate between your ordinary voice, whisper and a loud whisper. Be aware of what you are doing with your abdominal muscles, and try to keep the same actions that you use for stage whisper when you return to normal voice.

One great advantage of nursery rhymes and light verse (like these) for learning how to make stresses is that once one knows the rhythm, the stressed syllables are predictable from it. So students can concentrate on getting the actions right, and becoming aware of how it feels to speak English authentically. (This will be, however, done in an exaggerated fashion at this stage of their learning.) 

Please share any thoughts you have below.