I recently had the pleasure of conducting a workshop on Wordplay and its important role in growing writers. Here are some of the messages I was able to share with participants. Trust they add to your thinking around the teaching of writing... Wordplay is such an omnipotent thing. It is unavoidable. Conversation, songs, TV shows advertisements, literature , greeting cards, brochures magazines and newspapers all employ word play abundantly. Everywhere we go, it leaps out at us. In many schools however the study of words, has over time, been shrunken down to mean little more than reading and vocabulary knowledge. And yet, I still recall my teachers encouraging me to play with malapropisms, oxymorons, listen for tautology and wonder at the mystery of invented words in Lewis Carroll's poem 'Jabberwocky.' I recall the fun we had creating rhyming couplets and discovering palindromic words. At home, my father regularly engaged me in wordplay and riddles. There were also ...

S ounds L ike P oetry I love the sound of poetry. As a poet I consciously play with sounds. As well as reading poetry with our eyes, we must read it with our ears. In other words, listen to the sound the words create. Sounds of words and sounds within words attract my attention when I am writing a poem. I repeat sounds in the hope of  attracting the ear of my readers. I want the sounds I have selected to be noticed and noted. The reader's mind is the destination for my sound bytes. I may repeat a consonant at the beginning of certain words to create ALLITERATION. In this extract from 'Simply A Walk In the Park, I wrote  the line containing several words beginning with the consonant 'b.':  A large wooly dog barks boldly at the butterflies In  the poem Jeffrey the Jellyfish' I have used lots of alliterative combinations. Jeffrey was a jellyfish A rather jolly jellyfish He floated freely in the sea Bobbing and bouncing happily Here is another exam...

What do you do when you want to remember something?  Do you say it to yourself again and again until you learn it?  That’s using repetition.  Repetition in poetry may include a word, a phrase, a line, or even a stanza the poet  wants to use more than once for particular effect. We hear it, We see it. We begin to feel its presence. When using repetition  the poet must make sure that what is repeated is important to the poem,  otherwise it can feel or sound overdone. In the poem, Bully For Me , I consciously repeated the words, 'But ours left'   in each stanza hoping to create a sense of relief in the mind of the reader. Bully For Me We had a bully at our school I think every school has one -But ours left Now, I can ride to school Relaxed We had a bully at our school -But ours left And now playtime is fun again We had a bully at our school -But ours left I wonder if that person is happy? Like me and my friends  Are now ...