Playing with rhymes

Nabanita Deshmukh

The following article was written after returning from a teacher training session in the tribal schools of western Odisha. It is important to mention here that the schools we visited were very remote and lacked regular teachers and basic amenities. The students were mostly adivasis and did not have enough knowledge of a world beyond their own.

Across generations, children have sung ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill…’ but in a remote village in western Odisha, this rhyme has been discarded by teachers.

“Our children do not like the English rhymes in the textbooks. They cannot connect with them so why teach rhymes at all?” asked Shantilata, a teacher in a village school of Bolangir district. The teacher’s question made us reflect on the importance of rhymes and whether we, as teacher trainers, could come up with novel methods of teaching nursery rhymes to village students based on the local knowledge of the area.

Importance of rhymes
Pre-school children all over the world are first exposed to nursery rhymes in their native language. These rhymes are simple forms of poetry that help children learn new vocabulary and also distinguish between different sound patterns. These skills can help them remember words or phrases.

The use of English nursery rhymes from textbooks would seem a logical follow up to teaching English to young students. That this method was not effective was pointed out by the young teacher of the village school. The vocabulary and the cultural context of English nursery rhymes are so far removed from the vernacular reality that children in small village schools often lose interest in rhymes and cannot learn them by heart. The psychological and the cultural connect is very often missing so English rhymes become irrelevant.

Rhymes are particularly important in ESL (English as a second language) classrooms because children are often shy to communicate in English with their teachers either in spoken or written form. Poetry gives these ESL learners a different way to express themselves that seems less threatening than the use of prose. This is because poetry takes away the stress of correct punctuation and structure from the language and children break out of their shells and communicate by using rhyming words and songs.

New rhymes for the village children
The challenge before us as teacher trainers was to come up with modified or new rhymes in English for the village children so that they could enjoy learning them.

Modified rhymes
We demonstrated this method of modifying rhymes to the teachers by first taking existing nursery rhymes in English and then replacing only certain words that were difficult for children to understand. For example, the rhyme:
‘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’

Got changed to:
‘Ram and Neel went up the hill,
To look for seeds and tubers,
Ram fell down and bruised his crown,
And Neel came tumbling after’.

Here we took into consideration the food habits of the adivasi children who made up a large section of the student community. These tribal children spend a lot of their time going up the hills to look for roots and seeds that make up their staple diet. Also, the names were changed to Ram and Neel to lend local flavour to the verse. The teachers, by seeing the changes, did not feel intimidated about writing entire rhymes in English on their own and felt confident about changing a few words in the existing rhymes and then teaching them to their students.

Here is a verse that a teacher changed. The children responded well to the rhyme, learnt it by heart and also recited it to us by doing some simple movements. The English rhyme, ‘Here we go round the mulberry bush,’ got changed to ‘Here we go round the Banyan Tree…” because there were plenty of Banyan trees around and the children climbed and swung on them every day.

Another rhyme that was changed was that of:
‘Old McDonald had a farm,
Eea, eea, o,
And in that farm he had a sheep,
Eea, eea, oh,
And a bleat-bleat here and a bleat-bleat there,
Here a bleat, there a bleat, everywhere a bleat-bleat…

The teachers wrote:
Old Gangadhar had a farm,
Eea, eea, o,
And in that farm he had a goat,
Eea, eea, o,
And a bleat-bleat…’

Here the western name of the farmer got changed to an Indian one and also a local animal like the goat got added to the list. The children were all familiar with animals like goats, cows, hens, stray dogs and cats so they responded well to the modified rhyme.

Added rhymes
The teachers were then guided to add more information to existing rhymes and here is a verse made up by one of them. The English rhyme chosen by us was:
‘Oh a-hunting we will go,
A-hunting we will go,
We’ll catch a fox and put him in a box
And then we’ll let him go…’

The teacher added the following stanza:
‘Oh a-hunting we will go,
A-hunting we will go,
We’ll catch a rat and put him in a box
And then we’ll let him go…’

Five other stanzas were added by inserting the names of local animals found in the area. This new verse not only became popular with the students but was also an effective teaching-aid for learning new vocabulary of animals found in the area.

New rhymes
The final task for us was to guide the teachers into making their own rhymes in English by using rhythms found in vernacular verses. We asked some of the teachers to recite Oriya poems and then asked them to come up with rhymes of their own. Immediately a teacher responded by writing her own verse influenced by a small poem in Oriya that had the same cadence:
‘Chak, chak, chak,
Lightning strikes,
From clouds up there so high,
Drip, drip, drip
Raindrops fall
So swiftly from the sky’.

Looking ahead
We wrapped up the workshop by inviting teachers to try out these three different methods of making new rhymes, modifying existing rhymes and adding new stanzas to English rhymes. We were pleasantly surprised when a month later we got a call from a teacher who attended our workshop. She said that the children were now responding well to rhymes and were even asking for more. We were delighted at the response and hoped that the enthusiastic teacher would make a difference by her methods at teaching rhymes to village children and also influence other teachers to do the same.

BOX 1: Strategies for teachers

Storytelling

Objective: Demonstration of a pre-reading activity (storytelling) for better comprehension of nursery rhymes.

Children learn rhymes faster and enjoy them more if they understand the overall meaning of the verse. For this to happen, the teacher could engage in storytelling by incorporating certain elements of the rhyme into her narration. For example, in the nursery rhyme:
Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow,
And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.

The teacher could begin her lesson with a story:
Once upon a time there lived in a farm a little girl called Mary. Her father was a farmer and so was her mother. There were many animals in the farm with their little babies like hens with their chicks, cows with their calves, pigs with their piglets, dogs with their puppies and sheep with their lambs. Mary’s favourite pet however was a lamb that followed her everywhere. He was small and cute and his fleece (fur) was white as snow. White is also the colour of cotton. Now in those days there were no buses, cars, scooters or auto rickshaws to drop children at school so Mary walked everyday to school and the lamb followed her there.

Once the story is told, the teacher could ask questions to gauge the comprehension levels of the children. Some of these questions could be:
• What is a lamb?
• Who had a lamb?
• What did the lamb do?
• What does ‘fleece’ mean?
• What colour was the fleece?
• Why is the fleece compared to snow?
• What animal in your village or town resembles a lamb?
• Can you compare the fleece to any other white stuff found at home?

Once the children understand the story well, the teacher can read out the rhyme and use it in class.

BOX 2: Role play

Objective: How to use rhymes for practising language structures.

Role play offers learners an opportunity to practise language structures in various situations in and outside the classroom.

In this context, nursery rhymes could be effectively used to teach right intonation, voice modulation, gesticulation and the formulation of simple questions. Let us consider the rhyme:
Johnny, Johnny
Yes Papa?
Eating sugar?
No Papa.
Telling lies?
No Papa!
Open your mouth
Ha! Ha! Ha!

The teacher could choose two students for the role play and guide the first one into making his voice grave like that of an angry father and the second one to talk in a scared tone like a guilty son. The questions in the rhyme could be read out with a rising intonation while the answers could be said using a flat tone. Teachers could also guide the students to use appropriate facial expression (anger, guilt) and movements (nods, hand gestures, opening of the mouth) while reciting the rhyme.

The author is a teacher and writer of children’s stories and rhymes. She is a consultant at Azim Premji Foundation, Puducherry and conducts workshops for teachers. She can be reached at deshmukh.nitu@gmail.com.