Nursery Rhymes for Kinder Times takes classic nursery rhymes and adapts them to modern themes, teaching children about social and emotional intelligence in an age-appropriate manner. What was the inspiration for your book?

As a preschool music teacher for the last 20 years, I was surprised by the fact that students were increasingly unfamiliar with many nursery rhymes/songs. After all, nursery rhymes have always played such a whimsical role in supporting language development and musicality, not to mention stimulating imagination and fun. Well, it didn’t take long to realize that millennial parents, teachers, and caregivers were avoiding those stories because so many of them are “dark” and outdated:

Three Blind Mice get their tails cut off by a carving knife! Ouch!
Humpty Dumpty falls off the wall and can’t be put back together again. Bummer!

“Ring Around the Rosie” is about the circular red rash that developed on bodies infected with the plague. The posies were the flowers carried in pockets to mask the smell of the dead bodies and ashes that “all fell down.” Yikes!

I realized that as a genre with potentially broad appeal, nursery rhymes could be modified to have positive messaging and a strong impact. I decided to leverage the inherent appeal of traditional rhymes in a way that would be more socially responsible and compelling to everyone and created Nursery Rhymes for Kinder Times®.

What were some educational aspects that were important for you to include in this children’s book?

There is a wealth of compelling research on the importance of social and emotional intelligence. That research indicates that social and emotional learning (SEL) is critical for high-quality early childhood education and foundational to improved academic, behavioral, and lifetime outcomes. I really wanted to create fun, memorable, easy-to-access SEL content for preschoolers and the adults who love them. Updating nursery rhymes to be more relevant, putting beloved and whimsical familiar characters in situations that would model and convey messages of kindness, empathy, and gratitude, and pairing the rhymes with tools for SEL (an emoji chart and guiding questions) were important ways for me to retain the educational, memorable qualities of traditional rhymes for a new generation of young readers. Making sure the rhyming and musicality of these new rhymes were on point was also an important goal so that the rhymes would support the language development that young children’s brains are hard-wired for when it comes to hearing rhyming words and processing rhythm and music.

What were some goals you set for yourself as a writer in this book, and for the series?

I really wanted to strike the right balance between a fun book to read and a book that stimulated young children and their grown-ups to engage in conversations about situational and emotional awareness as well as about compassion and caring. I wanted the situations and characters to model what children can aspire to, not lecture about what not to do. And, I wanted to make it easy for parents, teachers, and caregivers to build strong, positive relationships that are so critical to their children’s growth and development by having rhymes they could read together, talk about, and recall when the children found themselves in similar situations to the characters.

When will volume two be available? Can you give us an idea of what favorite nursery rhymes you will be adapting?

Volume one includes eight of the fifteen rhymes that were recorded on the Nursery Rhymes for Kinder Times album by Raffi and Lindsay Munroe (www.forkindertimes.com/album.) If volume one does well, I would hope to have volume two available in late 2024. It would likely include some or all of the 7 remaining rhymes from the album including, “Rock-a-Bye Baby,” “Sing a Song of Six Cents,” and “Old Mother Hubbard.” But there are also lots more rhymes that I’ve adapted, so we’ll see how things play out for volume two and beyond.

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