Nursery Rhyme Mathematics

During the last week of July I was in California, vacationing with family (including six of my grandchildren).  Most of these kids have grown past a fascination with nursery rhymes, but I still like them -- and think it's likely that memorization of rhymes helps with learning to read and count. 

Here is one of my favorites, "A Diller, a Dollar."

          A diller, a dollar, a ten o'clock scholar!
          What makes you come so soon?
          You used to come at ten o'clock;
          And now you come at noon.

Maybe this rhyme, along with "As I Was Going to St. Ives," gets part-credit for the pleasure I gain from thinking of paradoxes, opposites, confusions, and impossibilities. 
My previous postings of mathy chldren's rhymes include:   28 September 2011, 30 November 2011, and 23 January 2012.  And here is a link to a variety of other familiar rhymes, Lit2Go.