Poems For Children to Read, Learn and Recite

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

What are the poems about?

There are 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 poems neatly arranged in different categories, beginning with the poems about animals and ending with odes and ends. In between, you'll find family poems, poems about school, sports poems and a rather odd category called ridiculous rhymes, which includes riddles, brain teasers and the odd very odd poems.

Writing your own funny verse

Writing Funny Poems for Kids

Once you've read all the poems, learnt most of them by heart and perfected the performance of at least a few favourite poems, you'll be ready for something new. So why not try your hand at writing your own funny verse? I've written an introduction to writing funny poetry 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 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:

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 kids 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.

Copyright © Funny Poems for Kids / Patrick Winstanley 2002-2018 All Rights Reserved.
Individual poems are copyright of the stated authors and used with permission