Performance Poems

Performance poems are poems which are written for the purpose of performing to an audience or, at the very least, which acknowledge an audience or are intended to be read aloud. However, the audience could simply be a child listening to a story poem read aloud at bedtime. In other words, a poem which is so much better when expressed aloud for the purposes of someone hearing or seeing it performed rather than simply reading it, or which relies upon some level of interaction with an audience.

My Sister is a Bookworm

29 January 2012

This poem begins very sensibly, but the rhyming led me in a totally different direction…..so I followed and the story developed from there!  Check out the amount of alliteration in verse 3!

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Ministry of Defence Calling!

28 January 2012

VROOP VROOP! Red alert! Aliens have landed. Their spaceship is on fire…. It looks like they are stranded.

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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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