Watch: Little Bo-Peep Song

Learn and sing with us Little Bo-Peep song. We offer you these very simple lyrics accompanied by pictures of the little bunny with the gestures you have to make at each verse.

Description

Little Bo-Peep song, a popular English language nursery rhyme can be heard at Reader Rabbit Toddler Game.

Lyrics

Little Bo-Peep has lost her sheep
Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep

And doesn't know where to find them.

Leave them alone and they'll come home

Wagging their tails behind them.

Other versions

Little Bo-Peep fell fast asleep,
and dreamt she heard them bleating;
but when she awoke, she found it a joke,
for they were still a-fleeting.

Then up she took her little crook,
determined for to find them;
she found them indeed, but it made her heart bleed,
for they'd left their tails behind them.

It happened one day, as Bo-Peep did stray
into a meadow hard by,
there she espied their tails side by side,
all hung on a tree to dry.

She heaved a sigh and wiped her eye,
and over the hillocks went rambling,
and tried what she could, as a shepherdess should,
to tack each again to its lambkin.

Notes

The earliest record of this rhyme is in a manuscript of around 1805. The riting contains only the first verse which references the adult Bo Peep, called 'Little' because she was short and not because she was young.

There are references to a children's game called "bo-peep", from the 16th century, including one in Shakespeare's King Lear. For that "bo-peep" is thought to refer to the children's game of peek-a-boo. There's no evidence that the rhyme existed earlier than the 18th century.

The additional verses are first recorded in the earliest printed version in a version of Gammer Gurton's Garland or The Nursery Parnassus in 1810, published in London by Joseph Johnson.