Write Silly Poetry with your Children-It’s Fun!


Writing poetry is fun and it is another great way to develop language skills in children. Funny and nonsensical poems take out any seriousness in the enterprise. Brainstorming silly poems with kids, will get them laughing and thinking about words, rhymes and rhythms. Limericks are a great way to start. Limericks have five lines and a specific rhyming pattern. The rhyme is seen in the Mother Goose Nursery Rhyme, “Hickory, Dickory, Dock:”

Hickory, dickory, dock,
The mouse ran up the clock;

The clock struck one,

The mouse ran down;

Hickory, dickory, dock.

Lines one, two, and five rhyme, and lines three and four rhyme each other but not the other lines. Limericks have 5 lines. For some fun limericks for children, try this website: http://www.brownielocks.com/kidlimericks.html . For example, here is a silly limerick in honor of my cat, who is lying here beside me as I write:

There once was a cat named Trish,
Who spent all of her time in her dish;
she got so lazy and fat,
that she outgrew her hat;
and decided to only eat fish.

Well, you get the idea!

My favorite form for getting kids started writing poetry is the Japanese Haiku.
Haiku uses three lines of non-rhyming words to create a feeling or mood. Nature is a favorite theme for the Japanese Haiku writers. The first line uses 5 syllables, the second line has 7, and the last and third line returns to 5 syllables. Kids can pick any theme and go from there. Here is a silly Haiku that I just wrote, while looking at the same fat cat:

The fat cat stretches
licking her paw and her arm
She can’t reach her back.

For years, Haiku was a great fall-back poem form for my kids for homework! When you read the beautiful Japanese Haikus, however, you understand the difficulty of getting to the essence of a subject. Here is a site that explains Japanese Haiku: http://www.haikuspirit.org/index.html .

Several poems for school age kids, about nature, are posted below. They are written in both English and Spanish. I hope that that you enjoy reading them and sharing them with your children. Connie Goldin ©2010, Mom to Madre