Poetry off the page!

Teachers! Please visit our teachers resource for children's poetry help.

Adults and young people over the age of 13 – please visit our Facebook group (Kids Poetry: 'Poems, Beans and Chips' link here for discussions, sharing and collaborative on-line poems for older poets.

Poetry comes alive when it leaps off the page - why don’t you have a go at rapping a poem, or chanting it in a group, making it into a drama or maybe even singing it to a tune with instruments?

A really good poem to play around with is ‘I Eat My Peas With Honey’ written by an anonymous poet.

It goes like this:

I eat my peas with honey,

I’ve done it all my life!

It makes the peas taste funny,

But it keeps them on my knife!

Firstly you can simply read it expressively, maybe stressing the rhyming pairs.

Then you can perform it in a very dramatic way - play around with stressing different words, and changing your volume and speed.

Or you could sing it! I tend to do it (when I’m in busy bus queues!) to the tune of ‘I had a little brother, his name was tiny Tim’. If you don’t know that song, then make up a tune! Groups of you could sing it in ‘a round’ too. If you’re in a bus queue and are being annoyed by this singing, please don’t email ian@poemsbeansandchips.co.uk

Finally comes the rap! I’ve had great fun with lots of children doing this, and lots of flicking wrists helps! I tend to rap it very fast three times through so that I can keep up the speed.... have fun!

 

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