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I don’t sing this song anymore with my students….

I don’t sing this song anymore with my students….

“Ring Around the Rosie” is a really cute song and my very young learners loved to sing and dance to it. It was my favourite song to sing with toddlers after a movement song or dancing moment of my lesson, so they could just go back to the circle without me asking them or telling them to go to the circle again.
Now let me tell you why I stopped singing it.
"Ring Around the Rosie" might sound like a cute kids' song, but believe it or not, it's tied to something pretty grim - the Great Plague in 17th century London.
If you don’t know the lyrics, they go like this: "Ring around the rosie, a pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down." Seems innocent, right? Well, it's said to hide some dark stuff.
"Ring around the rosie" might refer to the red rashes that people got from the plague. "Pocket full of posies" could mean carrying flowers or herbs because folks believed they could keep the disease away. "Ashes, ashes" might be about burning the bodies since cremation was common during the plague. And "we all fall down" sadly hints at how so many people died from the disease.
Now, it's not proven that the rhyme is about the plague, but it's a spooky reminder of how bad things can hide in innocent-seeming stuff like nursery rhymes. It's like a secret history lesson that kids sing without even knowing it!”.
After learning this, I decided not to sing it anymore as I knew the background and it made me a bit uncomfortable.
I remembered this story when someone that participated in my workshop last week said that she thought songs in English were poorer in content than the Brazilian folklore. What do you think about this? Do you know any other stories about songs in English?
Share this post with your teacher friends that still sing “Ring Around the Rosie”...

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