Nursery Rhymes stories

The rhymes are here as verse, not as prose retellings. Humpty Dumpty begins with its four traditional lines, Hey Diddle Diddle with its six, and Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star carries the familiar opening plus the older verses about a traveller guided through the dark. None has been padded out into a story.

That brevity is the point. A one-year-old can hold the sound of a line long before they can hold a plot, and a two-year-old gets the pleasure of supplying the final word. Read the same rhyme twice if it is wanted; repetition is the activity, not a failure to move on.

For the very end of bedtime, use Row, Row, Row Your Boat, Rock-a-bye Baby or Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Their motion is slow and their last lines let your voice fall naturally.

For silliness, choose Hey Diddle Diddle or Old MacDonald Had a Farm. For fingers that need a job, Incy Wincy Spider supplies the actions and Hickory Dickory Dock supplies a beat to tap.

Leave a small pause before the predictable word: star, moon, clock, sheep. At first your child may only look at you. Then comes a sound, then the final word, and eventually the whole line. Animal rhymes make the first step easiest: the moo in Old MacDonald and the baa in Baa, Baa, Black Sheep count as joining in.

Use movement without turning the rhyme into a lesson. Rock for the boat, walk two fingers up the water spout, or tap a steady tick-tock on the blanket. Sound, touch and repetition are doing the language work together.

After the verses come the traditional tales children meet at the same age, told as prose. Goldilocks and The Three Bears runs four minutes and repeats three sizes of everything; The Enormous Turnip adds one puller at a time so the list grows and your child can chant it with you.

Keep the chases and the woods for nearer three. The Three Billy Goats Gruff has a troll under the bridge and Little Red Riding Hood has a wolf, both of which land better once a child is confident the ending comes out right.

Most nursery rhymes were passed from voice to voice before anyone printed them, so their first author and exact date are often unknown. Mary Had a Little Lamb is an exception, published by Sarah Josepha Hale, while Twinkle, Twinkle began as Jane Taylor's poem The Star.

The confident secret histories attached to older rhymes are usually much newer than the verses. Our guide to nursery-rhyme origins separates documented history from entertaining guesswork.

The ages one to three page begins with this same rhyme shelf, then offers longer repetitive tales for a child nearing three. Move to those when your child can hold one character and one problem beyond the repeated line.

Rhyming Stories & Poems is the next shelf for verse with a plot. The five-minute stories are the next step in length, and the toddler reading guide explains how to tell when a listener is ready.