Download Mp3 Nursery Rhymes

[Natalie Omahony]

Childrenfor generations have enjoyed their parents, or grandparents, saying or singing nursery rhymes to them. The comforting rhythm of the verses means that even at a very early age, babies recognise familiar nursery rhymes.

Some of the most traditional nursery rhymes have meanings which are irrelevant and pretty meaningless in this modern day and age, but still the rhymes live on from generation to generation. Some are clearly educational, teaching little ones to count and increase their vocabulary along the way.

There are a lot of benefits of teaching your child or baby nursery rhymes from a young age; one being their cognitive development. The repetition found in the rhymes are good for your little one's brain and teaches them how language works while also building on their memory capabilities. In addition, nursery rhymes also help to develop inferencing skills - both when encountering new words and in reading comprehension later in life.

Baby nursery rhymes are also really important to your little one's speech development. They can help young children develop auditory skills such as being able to tell the difference between sounds and develop the ear for the music of words. Rhymes like the ones listed below also help children to articulate words, practise pitch and volume, and enunciate early by saying them over and over again.

One, two, three, four, five

Once I caught a fish alive.

Six, seven, eight, nine, ten

Then I let it go again.

Why did you let it go?

Because it bit my finger so.

Which finger did it bite?

This little finger on my right.

Sing a song of sixpenceSing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye,

Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie,

When the pie was opened the birds began to sing,

Oh wasn't that a dainty dish to set before the king?

The king was in his counting house counting out his money,

The queen was in the parlour eating bread and honey,

The maid was in the garden hanging out the clothes,

When down came a blackbird and pecked off her nose!

The terms "nursery rhyme" and "children's song" emerged in the 1820s, although this type of children's literature previously existed with different names such as Tommy Thumb Songs and Mother Goose Songs.[1] The first known book containing a collection of these texts was Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book, which was published by Mary Cooper in 1744.[2] The works of several scholars and collectors helped document and preserve these oral traditions as well as their histories. These include Iona and Peter Opie, Joseph Ritson, James Orchard Halliwell, and Sir Walter Scott.[3]

And the new dimension of my wife turning from my partner, my best friend, to now she's that plus a mother. And seeing her change in that way is just absolutely beautiful and profound.

Early on, the crying is so delicate. [delicate newborn crying] Of course, it gets louder for sure. But I remember there's some sort of link between my brain and this crying that feels primal and deep and I remember instinctively wanting to soothe.

Certainly when a child is crying, singing, and that stimulus of a calm, reassuring tonality, even if they don't understand the specifics of it, I feel is something that's deeply human. Whether it's day one, or the 80th year, it's just something that resonates with our brain.

Leila: I feel like in our household, I'm the kind of force of chaos when it comes to making up songs. I'll come up with a new one every day, and then my husband's the sounding board. And if he can sing it again, it's on the album.

Leila: Traditional nursery rhymes are deeply entrenched in our culture, and some of them date back hundreds of years. But have you ever stopped to think what it is you're really singing to your kids?

Leila: And they did that. It was called The Great Custom. And essentially, the King would take a third of all the wool a farmer produced. And then the church, because the church owned the land, would take a third. And you'd end up with only a third to yourself to share around the community.

Leila: So because of that, a lot of people think that the nursery rhyme is actually about Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, who famously met their ends at the end of the French Revolution by losing their heads.

Leila: It actually comes from Lewis Carroll, who wrote Alice in Wonderland, he wrote a follow up novel called Through the Looking Glass. And there was a character in there called Humpty Dumpty who was inspired by the nursery rhyme.

Leila: And just like the disappearing Cheshire Cat and the pocket watch wielding rabbit,, Carol imagined Humpty as a fantastical creature... In this case, an anthropomorphic egg. And somehow, the image stuck.

Leila: And children still wanna dance. So they would get around it with these things called play parties. And essentially, they would just claim that they were children and they were playing and came up with a way of singing and dancing to it.

Leila: So a weasel is a tool used by cloth spinners to measure out a particular length of yarn. [sfx] It spins, and then when it's done, it goes pop [sfx]. Almost like a typewriter, like, [sfx] da da da da da da, and then you've got your ding [sfx] at the end.

Leila: So prior to that point, it was an oral history entirely. It was, you know, traded off. You'd hear different things that you're going to buy your baby to soothe them. It was the same sense, but it was a much more fluid kind of folk song.

Leila: I honestly think that looking like a dork is the best thing you can do for yourself, because people get to see what you're passionate about. And if they don't like that, then they don't like you, and they don't deserve to be in your life.

Leila: Recently in the UK, a couple of companies have started to think about actually developing songs that are specifically designed to soothe babies. So these are kind of scientific baby songs. And honestly, so far they seem to work.

Leila: I remember when my little one was really small, this was the only thing that would settle him to sleep. Between me and all the people I recommended it to, I think I must be responsible for about a million plays.

Leila: That is kind of where we're at now, a culmination of all of the things that we've learned about entertaining our babies. We know what a baby likes now. It's not just whinging about taxes, it's everything that they love. And I wonder what the future will hold for nursery rhymes.

I grew up in a way where I was very self-conscious, and very self-doubtful. And of course, I think anyone who grows up that way continues to struggle with that through adulthood, and I certainly do.

But I knew consciously, and with my wife's help, we did not want to instill that in our own children. And so I knew that if I was critical, or if I just didn't sing, that would instill a self-doubt in them.

Leila: Scientists have studied the effect of music on young kids' brains, and the results are remarkable. Listening to music stimulates the release of happy chemicals like oxytocin and dopamine. It has long lasting effects on the parts of the brain involved with speech development, and it helps to make kids more sociable and cooperative.

It's quite a gift that you're giving me here, because this is a period of my life, a decade when I have small children, where I know if I don't memorialize this, I will lose some of these deep memories.

A nursery rhyme is a traditional poem or song for children in Britain and other European countries, but usage of the term dates only from the late 18th/early 19th century. The term Mother Goose rhymes is interchangeable with nursery rhymes.[1]

From the mid-16th century nursery rhymes began to be recorded in English plays, and most popular rhymes date from the 17th and 18th centuries.[2] The first English collections, Tommy Thumb's Song Book and a sequel, Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book, were published by Mary Cooper in 1744. Publisher John Newbery's stepson, Thomas Carnan, was the first to use the term Mother Goose for nursery rhymes when he published a compilation of English rhymes, Mother Goose's Melody, or, Sonnets for the Cradle (London, 1780).[note 1]

The oldest children's songs for which records exist are lullabies, intended to help a child fall asleep. Lullabies can be found in every human culture.[4] The English term lullaby is thought to come from "lu, lu" or "la la" sounds made by mothers or nurses to calm children, and "by by" or "bye bye", either another lulling sound or a term for a good night.[5] Until the modern era, lullabies were usually recorded only incidentally in written sources. The Roman nurses' lullaby, "Lalla, Lalla, Lalla, aut dormi, aut lacta", is recorded in a scholium on Persius and may be the oldest to survive.[4]

Many medieval English verses associated with the birth of Jesus take the form of a lullaby, including "Lullay, my liking, my dere son, my sweting" and may be versions of contemporary lullabies.[5] However, most of those used today date from the 17th century. For example, a well-known lullaby such as "Rock-a-bye Baby", could not be found in records until the late-18th century when it was printed by John Newbery (c. 1765).[5]

A French poem, similar to "Thirty days hath September", numbering the days of the month, was recorded in the 13th century.[7] From the later Middle Ages, there are records of short children's rhyming songs, often as marginalia.[8] From the mid-16th century, they began to be recorded in English plays.[2] "Pat-a-cake" is one of the oldest surviving English nursery rhymes. The earliest recorded version of the rhyme appears in Thomas d'Urfey's play The Campaigners from 1698. Most nursery rhymes were not written down until the 18th century when the publishing of children's books began to move from polemic and education towards entertainment, but there is evidence for many rhymes existing before this, including "To market, to market" and "Cock a doodle doo", which date from at least the late 16th century.[9] Nursery rhymes with 17th-century origins include, "Jack Sprat" (1639), "The Grand Old Duke of York" (1642), "Lavender's Blue" (1672) and "Rain Rain Go Away" (1687).[10]

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