Fun Stuff
Rhymes & Rules
The Rhymes
Can you guess which Mother Osprey poem is based on each of the rhymes below? Click the links to find the answers — and also find out more about these classic rhymes.
Mary Had a Little Lamb
Jack and Jill
What Are Little Boys Made Of?
Sing a Song of Sixpence
Row, Row, Row Your Boat
One Potato, Two Potato
London Bridge Is Falling Down
Banbury Cross
There Was an Old Woman
The Tarts
Little Bo-Peep
Guy Fawkes
Sleep, Baby, Sleep
The Kilkenny Cats
I Saw a Ship a-Sailing
Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee
Hark! Hark!
Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star
The Rules
Try writing your own poems about a particular setting — maybe the arctic, or the Southwest, or even the school cafeteria. Re-writing nursery rhymes is like playing a fun game or solving a puzzle. First, you'll need to choose a topic for each poem. Then find a Mother Goose rhyme to go with it.
When I wrote Mother Osprey, I also made up a set of rules to follow.
1. Each poem had to be coastal in some way.
2. It had to be clear which nursery rhyme was being parodied — whether through subject matter, rhythm or actual lifted lines.
3. I couldn't rhyme the same distinct words in more than one poem. (For instance, if I rhymed "beach" and "reach" in one poem, I'd have to rhyme "beach" with something else in the next. I managed to carry this through in almost all of the 50 poems I originally wrote for this collection. I only rhymed the same pair of words twice — and those two poems made it into the book. Can you guess which pair of rhyming words was repeated?)
4. This was the most important rule! Each poem had to be interesting as a standalone poem. (For instance, here's a bad poem: Jack be cold, Jack be hot, Jack jump over the lobster pot. It fits the first two rules: it's coastal, and you can tell which nursery rhyme it is based on. But is it interesting? No!)
Illustrations by Blanche Fisher Wright in The Real Mother Goose, 1916
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