Nursery Rhymes!

A number of nursery rhymes are really well thought and designed. I watched a few with my daughter and was delighted to appreciate their intentions. Trying to elaborate a couple of them:

• Hickory Dickory Dock:  Obviously it introduces clocks to the audience. But then it also teaches the counting. And at a subtle level it introduces progression as the animals grow in size. And then this progression can be associated with the numbers on the clock.
• Old MacDonald: This one is a memory jogger. You start with moo-moo and move to baa-baa and then next. But each time you move to the next level you have got to recall the previous one all the way back to the first one. moo-moo. baa-baa, moo-moo. cluck-cluck, baa-baa, moo-moo. The audience can be introduced to the trick of association to recall the order of animals. Kool!

Now the tough part is to encourage them to appreciate these points. Just memorizing them up would be useless and should be sung by deriving the next step with these tricks.

Let me see how I can explain these to my daughter when the time comes. Right now she is too young for them I feel.