Poems For Children to Read, Learn and Recite
Funny Poems is a new and original collection of poetry for children aged 4 to 14. The poems have been chosen because they're all very short. They are also fun, funny, flippant, frivolous, or frightening, or in some cases all five. Explore the site and you'll find an abundance of:
- Easy poetry for pre-school children to read aloud or recite
There are lots of short poems which are easy for pre-school children to read aloud, or to learn and recite. There are animal poems, family poems, nursery rhyme parodies et al. - Short poems for primary school children to memorise and recite
Primary school children will find lots of poetry suitable for memorising and reciting, whether to satisfy the demands of demanding English teachers at school or just for fun. - Trickier poems and tongue twisters to test your recitation skills
For budding performance poets, there are long poems, tongue twisters and more measured humorous poetry, which make great performance pieces for the precociously talented. - Rude rhymes and a some very rude verse, just for older children
For older children, there's a selection of rude , very rude and rude Christmas poems which I've hidden so deviously that younger children couldn't possibly find them.
What are the poems about?
There are poems about all sorts of weird and wonderful things, from aunts and aliens to zebras and more zebras (there aren't too many subjects for children's poetry that begin with Z!). If you head to the find a funny poem page, you'll discover all the poems neatly arranged in different categories, beginning with the poems about animals and ending with odes and ends. In between, you'll find family poems, poems about school, sports poems and a rather odd category called ridiculous rhymes, which includes riddles, brain teasers and the odd very odd poems.
Writing your own funny verse
Once you've read all the poems, learnt most of them by heart and perfected the performance of at least a few favourite poems, you'll be ready for something new. So why not try your hand at writing your own funny verse? I've written an introduction to writing funny poetry which offers a few hints to get you started. Once you're launched, there'll be no stopping you and you'll almost certainly want to enter our annual Children's Poetry Competition, which gives you the chance to see your poem published on the website and win one of the fantastic prizes on offer.
Learning poetry at school
I hated poetry when I was at school, mostly because our English teacher seemed to choose very long, very dull poems and then spend hours dissecting them to extract every ounce of meaning. Poetry homework was worse, as our teacher set a series of increasingly improbable tasks for us:
- Find a poem which includes personification, hyperbole, onomatopoeia and a packet of crisps
- Choose a poem of twelve and a half lines and recite it to the class while standing on you head
- Construct a twisted concrete poem in celebration of your favourite breakfast cereal
Having suffered torture by poetry as a child, I decided that my own poetry website would so ridiculously rude about teachers and so sensationally silly that no sane teacher would let a pupil anywhere near it. My plan nearly worked, but it seems that there are some teachers who have grasped that poetry can be fun and still have a place in the classroom. It is to these enlightened few that I dedicate the site.
Only joking, the site is really dedicated to all those kids who know instinctively that life, and poetry, shouldn't be taken too seriously. However, we will let the odd teacher in, provided they are genuinely odd and they promise to behave. Have fun.
