Invention : New Nursery Rhymes
The use of nursery rhymes to help develop rhyming, metrical and structuring
skills is considered in the section BASIC CRAFT - nursery rhymes.
In developing these games however we were interested in the idea of nursery rhymes -
as short story or comment on events and people.
The game has been played both to
comment on current events (as many nursery rhymes are believed to have
done in their time) or purely for fun.
In each case, newspaper or comic pages respectively were laid out on a
suitably sized flat surface.
Since newspapers are large, the players threw carboard shapes of nursery
rhyme characters onto them, drew round the outline of the shape where it
fell and cut it out. They then looked at the content of articles or
advertisments on the cut-out until they found something of interest and then
wrote the poem in the style, though not necessarily the old rhythms or
form, of a nursery rhyme. The poem might simply retell a story or comment
on it or the people or issues involved. These poems were published as wall
posters and broadsheets in the 18th century style.
The comic version is similar, but being smaller counters were rolled onto the
field of opened-out comics. The cartoon frame that the counter landed
within was cut out and the poem was written about the events or character
shown in it. Players went on to draw their own cartoon and finally mounted
the poem, their own cartoon and the original comic frame together on
a display sheet.
For further information on this sort of game click on games listed under
INVENTION
in the INDEX side bar.
