Nursery Rhymes For Adults

[Derrik Navarro]

Iremembered it well, but a couple of friends in their 60s had never heard it. That surprised me, so I looked it up online where you can find everything from how to teach a crow to talk to the best fruit to eat when you have a headache. The web said, "This is a poem that most Americans are not familiar with."

According to rhymes.org, this was not supposed to be a nursery rhyme at all. It was a poem written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His son said that it was while his dad was walking up and down the stairs while holding a baby that he composed this tune.

I don't remember when or how I first heard and memorized it, but the website suggests it may have been taught in preschool or found in a nursery rhyme book. There was no kindergarten when I started school, so preschool for me means before I went to school. I probably read it in a book.

The characters in the poem represent Longfellow's children. He had a creative way of including his family in his writings. The little girl was his daughter and she was a baby at the time he composed this. In his early days, Longfellow did not want to be associated with such amateur verse.

Memorizing and reciting were a part of our education and life. Looking at these rhymes from the adult point of view, some don't make a lot of sense. For instance, the one about Mary with the attitude.

As a child, I never asked what a cockle shell was, but as an adult, I looked it up and it is a small, edible saltwater clam. The internet has a lot of explanations about the poem, including some religious significance and references to English queens, but I still don't know why I recited it as a child.

No, I didn't know a little Susie but, as I said, not all of the things we learned made sense. Obviously, though, even when we were young we were concerned about the balance of the world. Rain was necessary but getting out to play was more important because in the day we went out to play. We didn't have a TV set until I was 15, so we spent time with our friends. No cell phones, no games, no texting, just face-to-face interactions.

As I sort through these useless bits and pieces in my mind, I can't figure out why we learned them. Why was it important to learn about a purple cow? Perhaps it was good for our imagination. Most of the rhymes we learned were written by Mother Goose or Anonymous, but Gelett Burgess (1866-1951) wrote "The Purple Cow." Burgess was a wordsmith of the first order. He was a pioneering cartoonist, artist, poet, author and humorist and added a couple words to our dictionary including goop, blurb and bromide.

Young children learn nursery rhymes in order to get used to the way a language behaves. This includes things like pronunciation, pitch, and grammar rules. However, the often silly and imaginative nature of nursery rhymes is also meant to be entertaining.

Only, the same itsy bitsy spider that intrigues a child might sound a bit boring to adults, which is why most language learners might shy away from nursery rhymes. Still, when it comes to learning a language, nursery rhymes can actually be a clever way to become familiar with the basics of a language as well as the shared culture behind it.

If you wanted to learn English by using this rhyme, you might start by looking up the words and memorising them, reciting them to yourself, and trying to figure out what each word means. Then, you could see how much you recognise and understand before writing down anything you had to look up for further study.

Nursery rhymes may just seem like a bit of fun, a way to spend time and interact with your children or just a quick and easy way to distract them but the truth is nursery rhymes have so many more benefits for your child, both in the long and the short term and are incredibly powerful influencers in pre-school development.

Nursery rhymes have a lot more to offer than just entertainment value. They introduce babies and children to the idea of storytelling, promote social skills and boost language development. They also lay the foundation for learning to read and spell. Generally, children who will become good readers enjoy listening to speech, storybooks and nursery rhymes.

Key Benefits

Children are excited to learn about individuals who live in shoes or a cow who can jump over a moon. Nursery rhymes help your child learn to have a vivid imagination filled with colourful characters and various languages. There are also a number of key skills / development areas that can be influenced by simple nursery rhymes.

The doctor begins his explanation of nursery rhymes by bringing us back to what they really are to native speakers, a nostalgic look at our early childhood. When we first learn nursery rhymes we are small children they're fun tales or short songs that we learn that give our minds a small work-out that's fun. He does point out two of the practical uses of nursery rhymes for children, they build vocabulary for older English speakers and help people who are new to the language get used to the language.

I'd be lying if I said that the exercise wasn't somewhat challenging, I really had to think about these old nursery rhymes. I'm not saying that I cheated by using the answer key just below the exercise, but I will say that the temptation was certainly there. With that being said, the exercise gives the reader a unique point of view on the utility of these nursery rhymes. Words that we use in the nursery rhymes, and how they apply to tasks that we can still do today are made more evident. One example would be the Residential Construction answer for The Three Little Pigs because the pigs use different building materials which offer differing degrees of protection from the wolf, and so what we see described in this story is an emphasis on the quality of building materials used.

The article then begins to map out where different linguistic traditions come into play, and how they relate to vocabulary as a whole. This was a little more in-depth than expected as the doctor makes a transition from a talk that is partly psychological and into the linguistic, a turn that in hindsight is entirely warranted. He begins to talk about names and how they differ while still keeping similar roots. He also goes into how words change with the migration of people and their history, citing such examples of how the word "dog" in German transformed into the English word "hunt."

This article has two benefits for ESL teachers, the first being that it makes sense of using nursery rhymes to teach adults. There is an intellectual explanation for doing so, and I feel like this article does a great job of outlining the value that nursery rhymes have in our language. The second benefit that this article has is the mature discussion around that value I just mentioned, but in a way that expands our understanding of these nursery rhymes and the value that they have surrounding our history. With this extra information in mind, readers of this article will have a deeper understanding of nursery rhymes and can discuss them in-depth for more curious students.

Through nursery rhymes, children become familiar with the sounds and rhythmic patterns in spoken language, referred to as phonological awareness, which is an essential precursor for later formal reading.

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Listening to music together is a very good activity to promote bonding with your children. Sharing, listening to, dancing to or singing along to music is a great communication tool to employ with your children, right from their earliest days.

When you listen to a new piece or style of music, your brain works hard to understand it, to start to learn what to expect from the music; and your brain forms new connections in doing this. In children this is happening all the time. Music exercises the whole of their brain and is of huge benefit for children in developing neural connections in their brain. When they hear the same piece of music for a second time, their brain is better able to anticipate what it will sound like and what they can expect to hear. The more they hear the same piece of music then the more familiar they will be with it, and so the more they will like it.

So nursery rhymes are fantastic to help children learn as they have very simple melodies, very simple harmonies, and very simple words with simple meanings to them. However, there is no reason why young children should only hear nursery rhymes. Even very young children can listen to and enjoy complicated pieces of music, and of course as they get older the music will have more and more interest for them. I have played pieces by Stravinsky, Mozart, Florence Price, Fiona Apple, Bjork and many other composers to my children. My husband loves jazz and is far more keen on opera than I am, so he listens to a lot of jazz and opera while they are playing together.

I would encourage you to play whatever you like listening to whenever your children are around. Your love of that music will be infectious, and may even influence their musical tastes in adult hood. At the very least it may provide your children with a very happy memory of you listening to music together.

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