Nursery Rhyme

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The Primary English Encyclopedia: The Heart of the Curriculum, Third Edition

See also phonics, phonological awareness, poetry, reading, verse

This is a simple, traditional rhyming song or story. According to Townsend (1995, p. 105), the earliest known nursery rhyme collection was Tommy Thumb’s Song Book published by Mrs Cooper of Paternoster Row in 1774. This collection included familiar rhymes like ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ and ‘Hickory, Dickory Dock’ as well as some rougher, cruder verses. But the Mother Goose anthologies – the first being Mother Goose’s Melody – published, possibly by Newbery, in the 1780s – are the best known of the early collections.

The rhymes that survive in modern collections have their roots in different centuries and in different contexts (see Peter and Iona Opie’s The Oxford Book of Nursery Rhyme, 1951). We must remember that the rhymes were often intended for the amusement of adults. Away from their original political and social settings they are often delightfully absurd.

This absurdity, and the subversion of the normal rules of the real world, seems to be one aspect that still appeals to the children of today. Nursery rhymes can create special worlds of the imagination and wonderful opportunities for language play. Margaret Meek writes: ‘They are memorable as speech, they also form the bedrock of all play, the alternative world. Jack and Jill, Old Mother Hubbard, Simple Simon, Polly who put the kettle on are all there, ready to pop into stories, play-acting and a million children’s books, generation after generation’ (Meek, 1991, p. 84).

There is great variety in these short narratives we call nursery rhymes. Some tell of unpleasant events – Humpty Dumpty, Three Blind Mice and Jack and Jill all suffer grievous injury. In contrast, ‘I had a little nut tree, Nothing would it bear, But a silver nut-meg, And a golden pear’ is gentle and poetic. Whatever their theme they help prepare children for the imaginative world of fiction and for their own attempts at verse. You may know the landmark publication of the Opies – The Lore and Language of School Children – which celebrated the playground rhymes and culture of children in the 1940s and 1950s. Georgina Boyes has revisited the Opie’s work and added evidence from her own research of the folklore of children brought up in a computer age. She shows how ancient rhymes are reworked and new ones added (Boyes, 1995).

As well as being hugely enjoyable for their own sake a number of research studies, notably those carried out by Bryant et al. (1989) and Goswami and Bryant (1990), link familiarity with nursery rhymes with success in learning to read. Children need to ‘hear’ separate sounds in the flow of spoken language around them if they are to learn to use the symbols of our alphabetic system to read and to write. Repetition of the nursery rhymes seems to help with a recognition of separate sounds which is called ‘phonological awareness’. When children see the rhymes written down this brings to their attention some of different ways in which sounds are spelt. It is splendid that something as enjoyable as listening to and saying nursery rhymes should also be helpful in learning to read. I heartily recommend Rhyme, Reading and Writing edited by Roger Beard: the contributors explain recent research on the central role of rhyme and alliteration in the process of learning literacy and celebrate children’s sheer delight in the linguistic playfulness of nursery rhymes.

Avery, Gillian and Kinnell, Margaret (1995) ‘Morality and levity’, pp. 61–9 in Hunt, Peter, An Illustrated History of Children’s Literature Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Beard, Roger (ed.) (1995) Rhyme, Reading and Writing London: Hodder & Stoughton (Chapter 8).

Bryant, P.E., Bradley, L., Maclean, M. and Crossland, J. (1989) ‘Nursery rhymes, phonological skills and reading’, in Journal of Child Language, 16, pp. 407–28.

Goswami, Ursula and Bryant, Peter (1990) Phonological Skills and Learning to Read Hove, East Sussex: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Meek, Margaret (1991) On Being Literate London: The Bodley Head.

Opie, Iona and Opie, Peter (1959) The Lore and Language of School Children Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Townsend, John Rowe (1995, sixth edition) Written for Children London: The Bodley Head.