Dramatized Rhythm Plays Mother Goose and Traditional — Story, Setting & Ideas

Movement as Literal Translation

Richards treats each line of a nursery rhyme as a discrete unit of action. For “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” the line “The King was in the counting house” prompts a quarter-turn jump and sitting down; “Counting out his money” requires the child to “hold imaginary coins in palm of left hand and count with the right hand.” This word-by-word choreography leaves little room for improvisation. The same approach appears in “See Saw, Marjory Daw,” where the center pupil bends trunk to the right and left while outer pupils “act as riders on board, bending and stretching knees.” The movements are not symbolic or expressive in a theatrical sense; they are literal, physical translations of the text, designed to be executed in unison.

Classroom Architecture as Stage

The descriptions reveal a classroom arranged in rows of desks with defined aisles and seat areas. Richards uses this fixed layout as the performance space. In “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” children vault over seats, sit in “seat area,” and stand in “right aisle.” The “See Saw, Marjory Daw” formation requires three aisles to work together: the center aisle pupil stands with arms raised sideward, while outer aisles grasp those hands. The room itself becomes a stage set, with desks doubling as props for sitting, vaulting, or supporting. This integration of furniture into the activity suggests that the plays were designed for ordinary classrooms, not specialized gymnasiums.

Catalog Subjects vs. Actual Content

The Project Gutenberg record lists “Schools -- Exercises and recreations” and “Exercise music” as subjects, with secondary tags “drama-theatre” and “music.” The excerpts confirm the first two: the book is indeed a collection of exercises set to nursery rhymes. However, the “drama-theatre” tag is misleading. There is no dialogue, character development, or narrative arc. The “dramatized” element is limited to miming actions like “imitating the opening of the pie” or “fluttering of arms up and down, imitating the flying of birds.” The music tag is accurate only in that the book includes MIDI files and sheet music for the songs, but the primary focus is on the physical movements, not musical instruction. The catalog’s emphasis on drama and music overstates the book’s theatrical and musical dimensions.

Readers approaching this work should expect a practical manual, not a storybook or performance script. The value lies in its detailed, step-by-step instructions for group movement, which reflect early 20th-century physical education philosophy. The excerpts show a strong emphasis on order, repetition, and teacher-led direction, with little room for child-led creativity. Those interested in the history of classroom exercise or the adaptation of folk material for pedagogical purposes will find this a precise, if narrow, example.

That rain-washed afternoon, mimicking “Little Boy Blue” with second graders, I kept noticing how a single rhyme could anchor a whole body of movement. The same instinct—finding structure within playful repetition—surfaced later in Hand-Craft: The Most Reliable Basis of Technical Education in Schools and Classes — A Closer Reading, where hands shape what rhythm sets in motion. One book simply leaned into the other.