Poems For Children

Funny Poems is a new and original collection of poems for children aged 4 to 14. The poems have been chosen because they're all very short. The poems are also fun, funny, frivolous or frightening, or in some cases all four. Explore the site and you'll find an abundance of:

• Easy poems for pre-school children to read aloud or recite
  Funny Poems has lots of very 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 funny poems for primary school age children to learn and recite
  Primary school children will find loads of funny poems suitable for learning by heart 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 longer, trickier funny poems, tongue twisters and more measured humorous poems, which make great performance pieces for the precociously talented.
• Rude funny poems and a few very rude poems, just for older children
  For older children, there's a selection of rude poems, very rude poems 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 funny 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 funny poems neatly arranged in different categories, beginning with the funny poems about animals and ending with funny odes and ends. In between, you'll find funny family poems, nonsense verse, poems about school, sports poems and a rather odd category called bad children and cautionary verse, which doesn't actually contain children, but instead contains poems about very, very, naughty children.

Writing your own funny poems

Once you've read all the poems, learnt most of them by heart and perfected the performance of at least a few favourite funny poems, you'll be ready for something new. So why not try your hand at writing your own funny poems? I've written an introduction to writing funny poems 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 Funny Poems 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
• Write an acrostic poem or shape 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 children 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.