Nonsense stacked on nonsense: a fiddling cat, a moon-jumping cow, a laughing dog, a dish that runs off with a spoon. None of it needs to mean anything, which is rather the point at this age, since the rhythm and the sheer daftness of the images are what land. Good for pointing at each character as it appears.
Sung or spoken in a galloping sing-song.
From Mother Goose / Nursery Rhymes (traditional). See the whole collection.
Hey, diddle, diddle!
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon;
The little dog laughed
To see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.
About this poem
It is nonsense, and it means to be. The rhyme was first printed around 1765, in a collection called Mother Goose's Melody. People have tried to pin it to real things over the years: a cat named for Queen Elizabeth, a group of star constellations, a village inn. None of it holds up. The joy is a cow clearing the moon and a dish running off with a spoon, and nobody being made to explain why.
Let the words gallop, then land hard on the last line. Children like to act it out: an arm arcing the cow up over the moon, two fingers running the dish and spoon off across the table. A good thirty seconds of silliness before tea.
Public domain. Text from The Real Mother Goose (Blanche Fisher Wright, 1916), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition