Limericks (Clean)

St. Paddy's Day and thereabouts would be a good time to explore limericks with your students. I always liked Edward Lear's nonsensical writings and drawings when I was a kid- I bet many kids still would. On the other hand, they may not find them funny at all. While I think his habit of "rhyming" a word with itself was sort of cheating, it's still clever stuff. You can access some of his limericks at The Edward Lear Home Page.

Language Lens

• Explore the absurdity in Lear's poetry with your students, eliciting causal statements about what makes it "nonsense."
• The drawings could be used as a model before reading his poems aloud without pictures, asking students to make their own sketches (thus practicing a visualization strategy). Kids would enjoy comparing and contrasting the results with Lear's!
• Phonemic awareness could be targeted by identifying and generating alternate rhymes.