WORD PLAY

If you are unsure what word play is, look at the TEACHERS PAGE, FIGURATIVE WRITING, WORD PLAY for details, and have some fun with the WORD PLAY JOKES GAME, and the NEWSPAPER WORD PLAY GAME. A very basic definition is that word play is a play on words which can be used to infer two different meanings, often with a funny effect. Therefore, it is often used in jokes and in newspaper headlines etc.
Some of my poems include word play, and these are therefore listed together below, although they may only have a small amount of word play along with using other figurative writing techniques. As far as possible, I have provided a description with each poem to give an indication as to how much word play features within it, as they will vary in usefulness when teaching (or learning) word play specifically as a figurative writing skill.

A Wii Celebration

19 January 2012

    Okay, so I’m not the first to giggle at the word that Nintendo chose to use, but it was the perfect pun example and was crying out to be used as word play so I couldn’t help myself.

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A Royal Pardon

16 January 2012

  This is the ultimate poem to demonstrate alliteration for kids with an enormous amount of alliteration and assonance in it, as well as the use of word play as a punchline.  It is part of a trilogy of poems which include consonance, language styles in performance poems, letter poems and word play.

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A Poetic Nature Trail

15 January 2012

A Poetic Nature Trail   This children’s poem is full of alliteration and word play, with some hyperbole (exaggeration for effect) and similes and metaphors.  The poem is deliberately written to be ‘performed’ by a teacher, as if on a nature trail, with the purpose of encouraging children that they could be undiscovered poets.

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