The Real Mother Goose (Real Mother Goose) (original 1916; udgave 1994)

Withdrawn by Rebecca Schaffner ( )

Classic rhymes. ( )

Enjoy the traditional rhymes, riddles, songs, and stories of The Real Mother Goose in the original edition. For more than 80 years, young children have been delighted by this delightful, imaginative collection. Share the rhymes you enjoyed with your own child. Illustrations bring each rhyme to life.

The Real Mother Goose. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://shop.scholastic.com/parent-ecommerce/books/the-real-mother-goose-9780590....

The Real Mother Goose may not include my favorite kids’ rhyme to teach college freshmen. Many memorize it at first hearing:
“Little Robin Redbreast
Sitting on a pole—
Niddle noddle went his head
And poop went his hole.”
That was printed in early Mother Goose books in England, but maybe suppressed (like Sir John Suckling’s “Love is the fart / Of every heart,” 1646) until unearthed in the last few decades.
Speaking of England, these have a distinctly British accent, like "Little Robin Redbreast": that's the British bird, very small, while the American Robin is good-sized for a songbird. And "Itsy, bitsy spider went up the garden spout": it's the outdoor yard spout--the British word for "yard" is "garden." And there are more, yet we consider them American nursery rhymes.
I wonder how many kids learn Mother Goose now, maybe fewer than when I read ‘em to my kids four decades ago, though of course I’d learned dozens as a kid, and maybe now many learn from parents who also learned by hearing, not reading. Little Bo-Peep has lost her sheep, Little Boy Blue come blow your horn, and especially,
“Rain, rain, go away
Come again some other day,
Little Johnny wants to play.”
I say this in the rainy aftermath of Hurricane Michael on our south New England coast. Lots about shepherd kids and their sheep, some about pigs (and "This little piggy"), and of course much about field and hills,
“Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.”
Maybe this one needs revision; it suggests females can not avoid males’ calamities. I’m quite sure as a kid my sense of Jack’s broken crown was in fact a diadem, not a brain hemorrhage.
Besides rural geography, there’s many food references, like
“Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake,
Baker’s man.
Bake me a cake
As fast as you can.

Pat it, and prick it,
And mark it with T.
Put it in the oven
For Tommy and me.”
But the most comprehensive dietary assessment,
“Jack Sprat could eat no fat,
His wife could eat no lean;
And so, betwixt them both,
They licked the platter clean.”
Debates about the health of fat or meat go back at least to the Renaissance, and Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy— which dicusses the effect of meat on depression (the Renaissance word for it, in the title).
Some are satires on cuteness, like “There was a little girl/ Who had a little curl,/ Right in the middle of her forehead./ When she was good, /She was very, very good;/ But when she was bad, she was horrid.” Longfellow wrote that, and the little curly girl strikes up an upstairs fit her mom mistakes for the boys’ fighting.
Then there's the astronomical ones, "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star...like a diamond in the sky." Romeo tells us Juliet's eyes would be brighter than the fairest stars. But we are still on the nursery level about stars, "How I wonder what you are, / Up above the world so high...." And the meteorological ones, "Itsy, bitsy spider/ Went up the garden spout./ Down came the rain and/ Washed the spider out.// Out came the sun and/ Dried up all the rain./ The itsy, bitsy spider / Climbed up the spout again."

Many of the rhymes urge kids into athletic or physical skills, “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick,/ Jack jump over the Candle-stick.” Wonder what kids make of this if they’ve never seen a candlestick—or, implied in the verse, a candle in it, unless it’s a very tall candle-holder, which the past did feature. ( )

Summary: this book is a compilation of classic nursery rhymes such as little bo peep and hickory dickory dock.

Personal review/Classroom use: I grew up on nursery rhymes and it makes me sad to see that many students don't know any of them these days. This is another text I would use to teach rhyming or even as a 5 minute transition time to expose students to literary elements. ( )