Kate Williams

It’s FIRE-UP-FRIDAY –

my weekly post offering tips and ideas for firing up your young poets!

This week’s idea:

Riddle Rhymes!

With the exciting aim of puzzling your audience, children forget that they’re writing poetry. Ok, it may be the simplest of rhymes, or simply a description written in short lines like a poem, but it’ll still be a step into that often feared literary form. 

Here are a few types of riddle to try with your class:

Identity:

A What/Who am I? poem: this could involve a description of the unidentified item, animal, character or person through several (rhyming?) verses.

A hidden word to find:

this could require the reader to join up the initials of the first word on each line, as in an acrostic, or of the last word, or all the initials in the last line, perhaps.

Word search challenge:

Most children will be familiar with word searches, but to make your own can be very tricky. Show the children how to write the secret word in their chosen direction, then to conceal it by using its letters to make other words going in different directions. They can then announce their word at the start and challenge others to find it.  While a word search creation is not poetry, it uses similar skills in choosing and arranging words flexibly for a purpose.  

Missing link:

Older children will enjoy joining words by their shared end-start letters, as in ‘pearladybird’ (pearl ladybird). They can then add in one word that doesn’t share a letter with the next, therefore breaking the chain. Readers will have the fun task of spotting it.

RIDDLE ANSWERS can be written in tiny letters, upside down, hidden in a picture, or written on the reverse page – adding in extra enjoyment for writer and reader alike.

Have fun!

Kate