Without rhyme or reason

          One of my monthly tasks for my current job is to decide on weekly themes for our classrooms and suggest activity ideas for the teachers to do with the children. Part of me hates doing this — at least the part about deciding on themes. I hate to be fenced in like that and don’t like to impose themes on others. However, I really like researching ideas and then seeing what types of artwork and activities the classes actually do.

Sometimes selecting the themes is easy and sometimes it’s hard. Holidays make it easy. Long summers when we’ve hit just about every hot weather topic make it hard. And it’s been a very long summer.

So for August one of the themes I’ve chosen is nursery rhymes.

Children don’t seem to know rhymes nowadays. Ok, some do, but not all. This idea is so foreign to me, the idea of children not knowing rhymes. I grew up hearing rhymes, reading rhymes, reciting rhymes.

Mother Goose. Seriously, Mother Goose was like an extra grandma. Gammy had several books of nursery rhymes — not that I didn’t have some at home and at Granny’s as well — and Friday nights were spent in reading them (when we weren’t visiting, playing pinochle, or singing along with Mitch). Of course, the prime book, the one that I probably had copies of at all three places, was the Little Golden Book.

These were cheap books, at least cheap as books went at that time. And short. Just the right length for a beginning reader to peruse on her own. Or for grandparents, parents, or aunts who were busy with other things to satisfy a request to read and not spend too much time at it.

I had other Little Golden Books as well:

And when my kids were born we continued the tradition:

That was one of their favorites, though there were books of rhymes as well.

I had other books with those nursery rhymes in them, most notably from the sets of books that came with our encyclopedia set. My parents decided that one of the best things they could do to further our education was to supply us with reference books. Yes, we had other books around (more on that some other time) and we went to the library (more on that as well), but we needed something to help us with our schoolwork. And so, we became the proud owners of a set of Collier’s Encyclopedia.

And it came with two bonus collections: a set of Best in Children’s Books

And The Junior Classics.

Both of these contributed to my knowledge of rhymes and fairy tales. And I guess in more ways than I had guessed. When I was researching for this entry (meaning shamelessly borrowing photos from internet sites), I found a story about one of the Best in Children’s Books, a volume of fairy tales that included The Little Red Hen.

Notice who illustrated it? Andy Warhol. Wow. What impact did that have on my childhood?

Then again, better Andy Warhol than some of the Little Golden Book illustrators.

Can we say creepy?

But the topic of this entry is rhyme.

It wasn’t just nursery rhymes, not by a long shot. No, we knew poetry. Or as I thought it was for my earliest years, “pomes.” After all, that’s how we said it. Each marking period (6 weeks worth of school) brought us a new poem, written on the blackboard in white chalk, in the careful hand of our teachers, which we then copied into our composition books (supplied by the school, by the way, not purchased by our parents), took home with us, and memorized. Each marking period we had to stand in front of the class, standing up straight, not slouching, hands clasped in front of us, as we recited the selected poem, recited it in a sing-song voice.

The Swing

By Robert Louis Stevenson

How do you like to go up in a swing,

Up in the air so blue?

Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing

Ever a child could do!

Up in the air and over the wall,

Till I can see so wide,

Rivers and trees and cattle and all

Over the countryside —

Till I look down on the garden green,

Down on the roof so brown,

Up in the air I go flying again,

Up in the air and down.

I think that was the first poem I had to memorize, at least it’s the first one that I remember (and I only partially remember it: I had to look it up to find out the exact words). There were others but this was early on and it was relevant, because it really described what I loved to do.

Not that I saw any cattle or rivers from the swing in my grandparents’ yard. But the up and down part — that I got.

At any rate, the rhymes were a part of my childhood, a very important part. And while I searched and printed, I thought back over the rhymes, thought of Mary and Bo Peep with their sheep, of Little Miss Muffet running from a spider, of silly Jack jumping over a candle stick or putting his thumb in a pie. I hear many of them daily, the ones that are set to music, because they are played in the classrooms over and over (much better than kidz bop versions of current songs that are far too mature for the kids).

I hope that a weekly theme of nursery rhymes, even if it is only a week, coupled with all of that background music, will make some impression on the kids. I really want them to grow up with rhyme, with rhyme that may not make perfect sense, that may be nonsensical, but that will be remembered later, when those kids are grown.