Gimme a Break, Rattlesnake!: Schoolyard Chants and Other Nonsense

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

Compiler/writer Sonja Dunn has collected some 120 “schoolyard chants
and other nonsense” and acknowledges that “here and there I
couldn’t resist the temptation to add new verses and a few rhymes of
my own.” Unfortunately, by never identifying where her hand has been
at work, Dunn leaves readers to wonder, for example, if she introduced
the “waterbed” into an entry that also makes reference to the
now-vanished police call box, or if the rhyme’s elements simply
evolved over time.

The collection’s contents, usually two to three items per page, have
no discernable order or arrangement. While the reader’s history might
allow her or him to identify some items as being skipping or
ball-bouncing chants, others as tongue-twisters, and still others as
schoolyard taunts, a great many will remain uncategorized. Because of
the personal autograph book’s decline in popularity, play-on-words
entries, like “Yours till butterflies,” will just seem “silly”
without their proper context. Though a few entries, such as
“Skateboard Sam,” have an obvious contemporary setting and subject
matter, many others, with their references to such “ancient” and
unfamiliar persons and things as Jack Benny and coal chutes, could
simply be viewed by today’s young readers as historical curiosities.

Thurman’s grease-pencil illustrations, which spill over and across
the pages, are lively and humorous. Particularly delightful is his
rendering of flying cows “dropping [their] whitewash in my eye.”
While the book’s contents may appeal more to “older” generations,
elementary teachers might still uncover some classroom uses. Not a
first-choice purchase.