Singing Games

Singing games, also known as call-and-response songs, are children's games where play is accompanied with the singing of a narrative song. Music, rhythm, and imagination intermingle to create a potent means for fostering social relationships and remain an intangible link between folklore of the past and the present. Singing games, more advanced than finger games, can help children to develop a sense of melody, rhythm, and dance. Singing games are noncompetitive and can be utilized to improve social skills.

During the 19th century, children were introduced to singing games in preschool and kindergarten (children 4 to 6 years of age) in order to develop small and large motor skills, and thus improve physical coordination and increase vocabulary. Singing games, like the rhymes that accompany jump rope games, were part of popular [Page 636]culture dating back to maypole dances in the Middle Ages. Children often played singing games, forgotten by adults but perpetuated by children, in a circular formation. Children join hands and step in unison while they sing. These “ring” games are familiar and meaningful in all cultures, and experts in early education recognize that robust folk music adapted for singing games was perfect play for healthy child development.

Greek philosopher Plato noted the effect of music and play on children: “Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony make their way into the secret recesses of the soul, in which they mightily fasten.” Dramatic singing games were derived from some of the oldest known songs and remain a staple for group play for young children. For instance, “Leap, Frog, Leap” is a game for young children that dates back to the ancient Romans.

Children gathered and squatted upon their feet, and then hopped around after each other like a company of frogs, singing “Leap, Frog, Leap.” Folklorist Alice B. Gomme has been credited with recording traditional singing games popular in England, some of which were carried by wandering minstrels who traveled throughout Europe during the Middle Ages. “London Bridge,” dating back to the 13th century, is acknowledged as being one of the oldest European folk singing games still performed. Its great age and embellishments attest to the enduring universal qualities of singing games. “Old Roger” was a dramatic singing game utilizing traditional acting methods used in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, where a ring of children act out the parts of the chorus in order to relate incidents from a play about a funeral for Old Roger. Likewise, the singing game “How Many Miles to Babylon?” used a saying common during Elizabethan times. “Ring-o-Ring of roses/A pocket full of posies/A-tishoo! A-tishoo!/We all fall down,” accompanies a ring-song game first noted during the 1790s that was later standardized in William Wells Newell's Games and Songs of American Children (1883).

German educator and founder of the kindergarten movement Friedrich Froebel (1782–1827) encouraged the use of simple singing games in early education in order to “conquer crude materialism, and to break the path for idealism to harmonize with the practical actuality, and bring the real and ideal life again.” Froebel believed that early childhood was the best time to learn through play. He founded the kindergarten movement upon the model of a “child-garden,” because he wanted children to be fostered naturally like plants in a garden. Froebel encouraged kindergarteners to introduce basic games, simple in conception and simple in practice, to other children so that children become united as a group, freed from unnatural restraint and imbued with spirit of kindergarten play.

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