ABSTRACT
The aim of this paper is to present traditional nursery rhyme as a form easy to bring closer to children using the symbolic interaction method, through a presentation of the dance structure, which stimulates various activities. Nursery rhyme featuring text shown with movement, animation, and singing such as “Baby Shark” clearly indicates an additional arousal of certain meanings, sense and emotions in children. Therefore, nursery rhyme is shown in this paper as a general culture concept and a general context concept, which can be applied to encounters among individuals of different cultural or ethnic backgrounds. Regardless of the specifics of cultural background and the social situation involved, the nursery rhyme can become interculturally acceptable even in the context of the “new normality”. Namely, employing an interdisciplinary approach within sociology, literature and kinesiology, the paper will show how “Baby Shark”, in addition to games and content that is recognizable to children, e.g. role and position within the nuclear and the extended family, offers children, in moments of the global pandemic COVID-19, a sense of security at the level of recognizing the world of childhood which they belong to. If performed in a different environment, space, and context, this nursery rhyme can turn from a song with entertaining content to a song that raises morale, removes fear, and instills hope. Furthermore, showing children, as recipients, certain contents of the rhyme through movement results in an interaction of different meanings and a synthesis thereof into a new meaning with members of other (sub) cultures. This is additionally supported by the fact that this nursery rhyme, sang mostly in English, is very popular. However, due to the technologically more modern social communication model, because of which the rhyme is a part of “secondary orality”, language barriers are broken both in the original rhyme and in a number of its versions. Copyright © 2020 by authors, all rights reserved. Authors agree that this article remains permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International License