Singing the Canon

Aunt Banana gave me a great book for my birthday, All Together Singing in the Kitchen, that I'm enjoying immensely, though only a chapter or so in.  Written by the musical Nields sisters, the book encourages all families to explore their musicality, even if they wouldn't call themselves musical.  One of the early exercises is to list your family's canon of songs that you sing.  I did that here once, though that's not nearly all of them.  I'm going to keep working on our list.  And on singing with the kids.  You'll be hearing more about this later.

But I've realized something interesting about the transmission of songs and nursery rhymes:  I think kids learn lullabies and nursery rhymes not because you sing it to them but because later, when they're older, they hear you sing and say them to younger siblings.  We sang songs and did Mother Goose all the time when they were young--"Itsy Bitsy Spider" was my go-to for years--but they don't remember any of them.  However, if I had a baby now, they'd hear me sing the same songs and recite the same poems to the little one.  I don't sing them those songs much anymore because we've moved on, but when I do, the kids have no clue what it is.  So I have this suspicion that my kids are going to be early-childhood illiterate, which is so strange considering how much time we actually did spend on "Baa Baa Black Sheep" and the like.

So, only kids and twins (real or "Irish"), does this ring true to you?