The origins of common nursery rhymes

Lots of interesting stories here about where some of our common children's songs and nursery rhymes come from.

I thought of Googling this after singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to my baby daughter last night. As I sang the words "how I wonder what you are," I realized that this must have been composed a long time ago, before we knew much about astronomy. Sure enough, it was first published as a poem in 1806. It's so neat that I learned it from my mom, who learned it from her mom, who learned it from her mom, and so on and so on all the way back to a person 200 years ago who was gazing up at the sky, wondering about the stars, and decided to create a little rhyme about it.