Fun Poetry

 I'm about to start a poetry unit this week with my Year 10 class and wanted to find some fun Readers' Theatre poems. (Readers' Theatre is a group recital of a poem with some performance techniques.)

My favourite poems for this kind of activity are Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes. Doug Macleod's Sister Madge's Book of Nuns is also a great deal of fun.

Alas, I cannot find my copy of Revolting Rhymes at the moment (woe is me!). As such, I decided to google to try to find some of Dahl's poems to use and I was fortunate enough not only to find some of the great Revolting Rhyme and Dirty Beasts poems, but also stumbled across another great humourous poet, Guy Wetmore Carryl. Carryl has written some lovely revisitionist poems of fairy tales and fables. My favourite thus far is: The Embarrassing Episode of Little Miss Muffet. I adore the polite and apologetic spider! The last stanza is particularly clever I think:

And the Moral is this: Be it madam or miss
To whom you have something to say,
You are only absurd when you get in the curd
But you're rude when you get in the whey.


Puns. How I love them!

Another great poem of Carryl's is: The Sycophantic Fox and the Gullible Raven