Dictionary Work & Nonsense Poems

This week, we focused on nonsense words in poetry.

We read a few examples (e.g. On The Ning Nang Nong by Spike Milligan) and the whole of the book Noisy Poems from the library - their favourite inside being one about spaghetti (Spaghetti Spaghetti by Jack Prelutsky) so we decided to use it as inspiration for their own nonsense words poem.

I asked them which food they loved which they wanted to write about and they both agreed on cake - specifically the cake they had on their 5th birthday! So I put up a picture of the cake and asked them to describe it, making notes on the whiteboard as a spider diagram as they went, prompting them with the idea of the five senses for description as well as how it made them feel.

Once they had a lot of ideas down, we tried writing the first verse together - what kind of rhythm did they want? Did they want their poem to rhyme? Which lines? We came up with:

You look so yummy,
I can't wait to eat you,
You're beautiful, colourful and

And? So they needed a word to rhyme with "yummy"... so let's make one up! Any word which ends in an "ummy" sound! And they went with "numummy".

In this way, crossing off ideas from the spider diagram as we went, we worked together to turn their ideas into a poem with nonsense words.

When the verses were all done and we read it through, I asked them if it was clear their poem was about cake... To which they said no! So what could we write so the reader knows they're talking about cake? And so we ended up with the couplet at the start and end of the poem.

Now the poem was complete on the whiteboard, I typed it up into Word so they could take turns on the laptop editing it to make it more personal. Then I printed it out for them to illustrate.

Our next few Literacy lessons were spent looking at dictionaries: what are they used for? (meanings of words) How are they organised? (alphabetically) How do you use them? (look up the word you don't know) What information do they have inside? (also the kind of word, e.g. noun, adjective, etc.)

Then, I gave them a template so they could make a mini dictionary for the nonsense words in their cake poem. First, they highlighted all the nonsense words in their poem and wrote their words alphabetically down the page on the template. Then they wrote what kind of word it was (they were all adjectives!). Finally, they wrote what their nonsense word meant, referring back to their poem to help them.

You can download our dictionary template here.