I loved nursery rhymes when I was little
Welcome to the wonderful world of nursery rhymes!
Do you remember nursery rhymes from your childhood? “Ring around the rosie” was a popular one when I was little.
I don’t really remember hearing them from my parents or at school, but I must have heard them somewhere because they are part of me.
When I became a Waldorf teacher, I used nursery rhymes as part of my circles, for transitions, and just for fun in my classrooms, and I also used them with my own daughters. But why would anyone use those silly rhymes with sometimes troubling images? This one comes to mind as one of the strange and troubling ones:
Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater,
Had a wife and couldn’t keep her.
Put her in a pumpkin shell,
And there he kept her very well!
It’s a strange one. But sometimes we can recontextualize them. I’ve presented this one as a puppet play for my little ones and as I worked with it, it turned into a protection story. Peter found a nice cozy pumpkin to keep his wife safe and protected. It turned into an image of love and protection. And really, no one could live in a pumpkin. Like fairy tales, these have an archetypal element to them. But really, the content of them isn’t the most important part.
Nursery rhymes connect us to the past
These rhymes have been repeated over centuries, sung to children at play or children falling asleep. Every culture has them. When my girls were little, when I would say or sing a nursery rhyme, I felt connected to other parents who used these same words going back through the generations. I felt woven into the fabric of time in a comforting way.
And yet I found that many of the parents I worked with didn’t really know nursery rhymes. Are they part of your past? I think they may be harder to connect to if you didn’t grow up with them. Especially if you focus on the images.
Also, while nursery rhymes do give me a feeling of being part of the stream of time, when I’ve looked up historical meanings of them–well, it just upsets me. If you’re interested, of course, you should check it out. But that level of meaning doesn’t really enrich the experience for me.
Nursery rhymes bathe the child in rhythm and sound
But there’s more to nursery rhymes than a connection to the past. Our little ones are trying to find their connection to the earth, finding their way into life here and now. These little rhymes can help them by bathing them in the rhythmical sounds of their native language.
Suzanne Down wrote a wonderful article about nursery rhymes in the Gateways Journal, which is the journal of the Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America. It is entitled, “The Healing Art of Nursery Rhymes.” She talks about the child, at birth, leaving the heavenly rhythms of the cosmos and coming into earthly life. I’ve written about the importance of rhythm for the young child. Nursery rhymes can help them find rhythm in a fun and healthy way. Also, Suzanne writes that even more than the images created by the words, “the power of rhyme, rhythm, and repetition … together heal inner chaos and make order on the cellular level.”
Sally Goddard Blythe says:
When we sing lullabies or nursery rhymes, we educate the earliest of the senses: the vestibular system through gentle rocking rhythms; the tactile system through the effect of gentle vibration on the hair receptors of the skin; and hearing through tone, timbre, repetition of similar sounds and the prolongation: of certain speech sounds.
The archetypal sounds comfort the child–and help them learn language.
On a more esoteric level, when a baby leaves the spiritual world and enters our physical world, they lose their connection to the archetypes. The sounds of language are one kind of archetype. We learn in eurythmy that the sound of each letter has an archetypal gesture. Even though we adults have, for the most part, lost touch with the power of these sounds, the child feels them. But this is not to imply that nursery rhymes are serious. They are fun and joyful, at least if the adults enjoy them, too. And if we fill the words with our love for our child as well as enjoying the fun sounds and silly stories the nursery rhymes tell–well, they really nourish our child.
On a less esoteric level, children are learning their native tongue–and to learn it, they need to hear it. So go ahead and give it a try!
What can you do with a nursery rhyme?
You can use nursery rhymes in many ways. I’ll be going into more detail in future posts. But here are some ideas:
- Touching games
- Movement games
- With beanbags
- With a certain task (In my class, we sang “Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub” when we washed the dishes
- As lullabies
- Just because
Here’s my version of the owl and the pussycat as a puppet play–not exactly a nursery rhyme, perhaps–but still one of my favorites
Do you have a favorite nursery rhyme? I’d love to know what it is!
Thanks for stopping by.
xoxo