What Are the Top Fun Songs for the Nursery?
That’s a question I get asked a lot. My answer lies in the category called Nursery Songs.
Most people know about Nursery Rhymes. When we’re talking about the nursery rhymes, we’re actually talking about literature. Most often nursery rhymes are found in picture books, and their job is to develop literacy skills. They can be fun, but there is another kind of song that is very useful for our purposes. These are the Nursery Songs also known as play songs.
Nursery Songs or Play Songs
This huge category of fun songs come with their own actions. They’re called nursery songs in some countries and play songs in other places. Researchers call them play songs. They are action song-games played with babies, toddlers and preschoolers. The top nursery songs appear over and over again on YouTube channels for Kids. New nursery songs keep appearing as musicians realise that kids are a great audience for their talents.
One such nursery song is The Ipsy Wipsy Spider (or Eency Weency!) Six Little Ducks is another nursery song used and loved in kindergartens in many countries where English is an important language. Nursery songs or play songs appear in almost every culture and language, especially where people value playfulness and spontaneity in their children’s behaviour. This type of song sometimes gets lumped in with the nursery rhymes, but it’s actually a song that’s been written for children.
Nursery Rhymes
The real nursery rhymes weren’t written for children at all. They were written as parodies, cautionary tales, and displays of sarcastic wit. For instance, Little Jack Horner was granted a parcel of land, “he put in his thumb and pulled out a plum and said, what a good boy am I.” He got a plum piece of real estate as a reward for doing some favour for the king.
So, key lines from nursery rhymes get into media headlines as codes in current thinking. It’s another reason why the nursery rhymes should be taught in childhood as important pieces of literature. But the great thing to understand about the nursery songs is that they’re written for children. They’re easy for them to understand.
Nursery Songs inside Nursery Rhyme Books
You sometimes find the top nursery songs in the nursery rhyme books. I have two volumes in a series, collated by Iona Opie. She and her husband were great collectors of nursery rhymes and nursery songs. She’s developed these two books with the illustrator, Rosemary Wells. Now, just a warning that, the dressing up of animals is frowned upon by some purists who want children to see an animal as an animal in its skin, scales, fur or feathers. I’ll just leaf through Volume 1, My Very First Mother Goose and we’ll see which ones are actually nursery rhymes and which ones are nursery songs.
Jack and Jill Went up the Hill, that’s one of the oldest nursery rhymes going. But Shoo Fly Don’t Bother Me, that’s something that was written in the U.S.in the 1800s, and is actually one that’s not sung now by people who are conscious of hurting others, because it was used as a coded insult to the African Americans during the period of slavery. I’ve taken that song out of my repertoire this last couple of years. It used to be an innocent fly-shooing song, but now it reminds me of casual cruelty amongst humans.
Boys and Girls Come out to Play. I think that one is a nursery rhyme and probably has some hidden meanings in it. ‘You bring milk and I’ll bring flour and we’ll have a pudding in half an hour’. It’s pretty innocuous though, I would certainly do it with children, but I might sing the opening line as ‘Everyone come out to play’ to make it inclusive. That’s called revisionism and I don’t usually do it. The choice is yours!
Humpty Dumpty is definitely a coded nursery rhyme and is probably about a cannon that got broken, that is, it fell off a wall and ‘all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again’. But somehow, it’s turned into being a song about an egg! Down at the Station— that’s not a nursery rhyme. That’s a nursery song.
How do I Recognise a Nursery Rhyme?
I hope I’m bringing some of top nursery songs back to you because this is possibly in your heritage. You might know these songs and if not you might need to learn them. Baa Baa Black Sheep is definitely a nursery rhyme with secret codes in it about who gets the money when farming is practised. ‘One for the master and one for the dame. One for the little boy lives down the lane’. Probably the little boy didn’t get much out of it, even though he did all the work, and probably he wasn’t a little boy at all but a strapping young man trying to make a living from his skilful labour as a farmer.
Cackle, Cackle, Mother Goose. ‘Have you any feathers loose? Truly, have I, pretty fellow, quite enough to fill a pillow.’ I don’t know what the origin of that is but it is definitely a coded reference to women talking amongst themselves, passing on secrets. But the point is, you can see that the nursery songs get scattered through and mixed up inside these nursery rhyme collections for children.
The point is, if you have books of children’s songs, go through them and work out which ones are likely to be your top nursery songs for doing the actions and which ones are nursery rhymes for language and speech development with pictures helping them to understand the content. If it seems mysterious it’s probably a nursery rhyme — still valuable!
Child Development and the Importance of Finger Plays
A great way way to recognise a nursery song is that it’s got some fun actions like ‘Incy Wincy spider climbed up the water spout’.
To do the climbing action, you’ve got to touch pointer to thumb. If you try teaching that to children of different ages, you’ll learn a lot about child development! So, you can see in the two-year-olds, they’re just doing any random thing with their hands. Probably with the threes, they’ll be pretending they can do it using random fingers. But with the fours, you want them to be in control of their fingers, and you can actually teach them to climb their thumbs and index fingers if you break down the movements into chunks and teach the pattern slowly. So that’s a perfect play song for learning a specific skill at a certain age.
And then, after that initial finger play, the game gets easier and we move our whole hands. We go up, down, washed out, ‘out came the sun, and dried up all the rain, So the Incy Wincy spider went up the spout again’. We finish with a repeat of the fine motor control finger play. Actually, with all these ages, the mirror neurons are working in the child’s brain. And even if they’re not doing it with their bodies, their brain is doing those finger activities — they’re moving in time ‘on the inside’.
The kinds of top nursery songs I use in my programs include both seated and standing/moving. I’ll cover the second kind in a different blog on whole body movement.
Suggestions for Top Nursery Songs
But for now, here are the kinds of seated play songs and nursery songs and some examples I used in our Sing and Play Program for 3-5-year-olds:
- Finger plays: e.g. I Have Ten Little Fingers; Where is Thumbkin; Here is the Beehive; Five Enormous Dinosaurs
- Body Percussion: e.g. Once an Austrian Went Yodelling, Warm Pebble; Jonny Works with One Hammer; Inky Pinky Ponky
- Memory Songs: e.g. Days of the Week; Goldilocks and the Three Bears; In a Cottage
