Lessons from Nursery Rhymes.

   Everything can be an opportunity to teach a life lesson when you are a parent. Sometimes the lessons come from child's action, sometimes from behavior of others. Sometimes life lessons will emerge from something someone else said, and sometimes yet there is a natural lesson in a story. But other times a lesson can be taken from a Nursery Rhyme for little kids. To tell the truth, many Nursery Rhymes are full of life lessons, and that's why many parents are eager to tech them to their youngsters.

   There are many nursery rhymes that teach lessons. Humpty Dumpty is a great poem about how much harder it is to put together something that was broken, so our kids should take care of their special things. Another great one is Georgie Porgie, a rhyme about a boy who was brave enough to bother little girls but wasn't brave to bother boys. It provides a great lesson about how cowardly bullies are. Little Boy Blue is another one of my favorites, and it's a really good one to spark a conversation about responsibilities.


   This week we got a chance to use one of the Nursery Rhymes as our poem for the week. It's called For want of a nail, and it goes like that:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost
For want of a shoe the horse was lost
For want of a horse the rider was lost
For want of a rider the battle was lost
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail

The build in cautionary tale teaches about the progression of little mistakes into large ones just by not attending to them while they are still small. If someone just fixed the nail in the horseshoe then the whole kingdom would not be lost in a war. I used Daddy's accident as a modern day example of this concept. I told the Monkeys to realize that few days ago Daddy looked at his wallet, which made him miss the changing traffic light, which made him enter the intersection at the wrong time, which in turn made him hit another car, and that in turn made his car non-drivable which caused Funky Monkey to miss his soccer game that day. And all of this happened because Daddy looked down at his wallet.

   The older 2 Monkeys had lots of fun coming up with different scenarios for situations that got worse by not dealing with the first "little" problem. By the end of discussion they understood the lesson in this poem and even memorized the whole thing in just one sitting. I have caught them few times this week just reciting the Nursery Rhyme out of nowhere. I am seeing this as their next favorite poem to quote. And I can also see them using it as a warning to always deal with problems when the problems are 'little" and they will be much easier to fix!