Topic Research: Nursery Rhymes

My three favorite nursery rhymes that I want to start researching and include in my project are Humpty Dumpty, Hickory-Dickory-Dock, and Hush-a-bye baby.

I want my project to be modern stories for kids to read before bed, but I will be combining different nursery rhymes to come up with each story so that they are still short stories, but not too short.

For my story based on the nursery rhyme Hickory-Dickory-Dock, an idea that I have is to change the clock to another object and instead of a mouse maybe use a hamster or some other animal in the rodent family that is not a mouse. I have not decided what other nursery rhyme I want to combine with this to come up with a new story, but I have the part for Hickory-Dickory-Dock.

Hickory Dickory Dock nursery rhyme;

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Hush-a-bye baby is a story that I am thinking of combining with Rain Rain Go Away and possibly one other nursery rhymes to be able to tell a story with events for a whole day. I was thinking about possibly changing the baby to an animal, such as a monkey. Monkeys are my favorite animal so I would like to somehow incorporate that into my story.

As for a story with Humpty Dumpty, this was always my favorite nursery rhyme growing up. It makes me laugh every time because it is a silly story. I picture trying to put Humpty Dumpty (an egg) back together and it seems quite impossible. I want to change the ending of this story to where somehow Humpty Dumpty is put back together again, just in time for something else to happen to him and break him again.

Picture of Humpty Dumpty sitting on a wall;

Source: Pixabay

These are the two links that I used to find stories to do my project:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/18546/18546-h/18546-h.htm
http://mythfolklore.blogspot.com/2014/04/myth-folklore-unit-nursery-rhymes.html

Project Topic Brainstorm

Topic 1: OU Ghost Stories 

I have always been interested in ghost stories and have once been on a ghost tour when I was in Saint Augustine in Florida. I really enjoyed learning about ghosts and seeing how into it the ghost tour guides get. When we did the assignment over storybooks, I read one over ghosts at OU and it really got my attention. As a student that goes to OU, I feel like learning about the history of OU even in ghost stories would be very interesting and something I am looking forward to. When retelling these stories, I would probably change the plot just a bit and add more details to the stories.

Topic 2: Dogs

Dogs are my absolute favorite animal in the entire world. The amount of love and happiness that a dog can bring into your life is unreal. I experienced it first-hand last year when I decided that I need a dog. This project would be fun because I would get to research things and stories about my favorite animal. With these stories, there are endless possibilities on how you can change them up to create your own. A good way to change them would be to either change the plot or change the location of the story and modify the story accordingly.

Topic 3: The Little Mermaid

This topic catches my interest because growing up I loved watching The little mermaid. It is awesome how things evolve as time passes. Mermaids evolved from sirens in the Odyssey that were half-bird and half-human. Now we have mermaids which are half-human and half-fish. I read some of Hans Christian Andersen's story of the Little Mermaid and I loved it. My idea to create my own story for the little mermaid would maybe be to change the personalities of the characters or maybe switch the characters as a whole and create new ones following the same storyline.

Topic 4: Nursery Rhymes

Nursery rhymes are always so much fun because they all rhyme and you can sing along to them. Some of my favorite memories in kindergarten and some in grade school are singing nursery rhymes together as a class and all just having so much fun. I even have memories of singing these with my parents and they once bought me a huge book full of nursery rhymes and bedtime stories that I loved. This topic would be fun to play with because I feel like you can go anywhere with this. I could change the characters and create a nursery rhyme with different characters or I could easily keep the characters and change the plot in the story.

Picture of the clock that the mouse runs up in Hickory Dickory Dock 

nursery rhyme; Source: Wikimedia Commons