The speech is very important in human life and human speech develops through life and begins at the early age. It is important to encourage speech development and there are many different ways how to encourage speech development through the games because it is known that children best learn through the play. This is why nursery rhymes have great quality in encouraging speech development. Nursery rhymes are short poems for children which are rhytmical. Nursery rhymes have influence on speech development, cognition development, development of speech creativity and development of movement and rhytm. Nursery rhymes can be spoken and sung. Also, they can be devided according to the content on specific, meaningless and combined nursery rhymes. Nursery rhymes can be used in different ways, in different situations and it is very important that preschool teachers pay attention on psycho-physical development of every child. In this papper, there are shown different examples of nursery rhymes and different ways of using them. Further, in June of 2018, a research was conducted to explore representation of nursery rhymes in the kindergarten around Croatia. Main goal was to determine representation of nursery rhymes in kindergarten and to determine preschool teachers knowledge and opinions about nursery rhymes. The results have shown that preschool teachers use nursery rhymes with children and that they understand importance of their use and influence on speech development and the influence on whole development. Preschool teachers understand that children like nursery rhymes and that they cause a lot of positive emotions. Also, preschool teachers mostly use traditional nursery rhymes which are used in many generations like „En, ten, tini“ and „Eci, peci, pec“. Exactly the fact that is used in many generations shows that nursery rhymes are unavoidable tool in children games and children enjoy them and use them in their play.