One fine afternoon, after taking lunch I was lying with my 5 years old son. I was reciting a nursery rhyme Ba Ba Black sheep have you any wool to help him sleep well. He was also repeating the nursery rhymes after me and then stopped repeating it. He asked me, “Why this poem has black sheep? Why not white or brown?” I did not have any right answer to satisfy him. I told him to sleep now and I would find out the answer of your very thoughtful question in the evening after searching it from reliable sources.
Baa, baa, black sheep
Have you any wool?
Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.
One for the master,
And one for the dame,
And one for the little boy
Who lives down the lane
I researched on assigned task to satisfy my kid’s query. It was really shocking for me to know that the reason for using black color as bad luck at that time and many scholars agree that the words ‘black’ ‘master’ gives a racial message. Now I was thinking that how could I explain all this information to my little champ who raised the question.
As I went through the insights of famous rhymes, it was increasing my curiosity to know more about nursery rhymes.
Ring around the Rosie …A pocket full of posies is another example and I am 100 % sure that most of us have read this most famous nursery rhyme. This nursery rhyme must take you to your childhood where you hold each other hands and moved in a circle and read this poem in a circle. You must imagine that you have a lot of roses and their sweet fragrance made you feel fresh. But if I say that it is not about all you imagined, would you be surprised?
In this nursery rhyme, it refers to bubonic plague. Ring around the Rosie points out red circular rashes, pocket full of posies with an herbal treatment that has a fragrance to hide the smell of rashes and A-tishoo is a sneeze sound.
The basic purpose of teaching rhymes in the early years is to help children to practice the target language. Moreover, nursery rhymes take children to a world that helps them to improve their imagination skills. When children perform actions, it helps them in physical development and during a performance when they hold each other hands it improves their social-emotional development. During singing rhymes, children have to follow certain ground rules that promote moral development.
I took out the book of rhymes from my child’s bag and started to read all rhymes. Now it was alarming for me to know that these famous nursery rhymes do not facilitate children learning when they drill and practice them in their classes. Jack and Jill, Three blind mice, Humpty dumpty, Rock a bye baby, Mary Mary quite contrary, and so on are examples of misleading child imaginations and irrelevant to their world.
As we know that early years are very crucial and sets the foundation for future success. Investing in early years keeps young children’s minds on promising path that lead them for lifelong learning and future success. Introducing children to variety of rhymes in early years are very important. Rhymes are child first experience with words and child develops an ear for languages. Both rhymes and rhythm help children listen to sounds that help them learn to read.
Rhymes are one of the best instructional material and best source of providing entertainment and education to support active learning. However, in real life situations parents introduce different rhymes through different gadgets to engage young children and they may feel that child will practice and repeat rhymes in order to learn a language. In schools, teacher play nursery rhymes to involve children in classroom where they repeat structures, phrases that rhyme. But unfortunately, parents and teachers do not aware that a number of poems give messages of racialism that has negative impact on child’s social-emotional and moral development. Children do not want to be each other’s friend and cannot adjust in any situation easily. Black, white, fat, short, tall, handicapped etc are examples of those words that children do not need to learn at this level when they cannot understand what is wrong or right. Some poems are gender biased that create concept of supremacy or favouring one gender over the other and present stereotypical imagery that has adverse effects upon children. Even gender maker are used in some poem that depict male and female characters of animals.
It is thought provoking for us that through nursery rhymes what we want to give to our children. It completely depends on appropriate selection of nursery rhymes that help children to learn language and develop socially-emotionally and morally.
Manager Academics at SIPD, Rashiabad