POETRY
INDEX
About this book
About Windows Workshops
About the workshop games

SIMPLE STARTS
Amazing PushPoem Machine
Shoveha'penny
Springboard
Pete's Powerful Poetry Pipes
Fishing for Words
Tom Phillips Game
Maze
The Bomb
Presents
What's in the box?
The Great Escape
Expanding Words
Hear here!
Going Round in Circles
Open the door!
Anagrams and Acrostics
Shaping Up

BASIC CRAFT
Rhymeboard
Pocket Rocket Primary Rhymer
Rhyme Forms
Rhyme Forms2
Nursery Rhymes
Limericker
Aboard the Pentameter
Wet, Wet, Wet
Supersonnet
Cooking up a Pantoum
Time to Twist the tongue: Alliteration
What is it, like?: Metaphor
As...as: Simile
Comic Strip: Onomatopoeia


DIALOGUE
How Do you see yourself?
What do you think you're doing?
Where we're at
Who do you think you are?
Voices
City of Poems
Windows on the Mersey
Postcards
Pavement
Birds
World Game

INVENTIONS
Elementary poetry
Phantastic Phonetic Phactory
Boom
Yellow and Purple Prose
Dr. Squint's Colour Co-ordinator
Sensational poetry
A Sense of place

A poem is a fertile egg
Amazing Animals
Word spotter
Encounters
Pirates
Dinosaurs
The World Game-again
Horror
Circus of Calamities
Gardens
Windows in Space
Spells
The Art Game
New nursery rhymes
Other

NOTES
Notes for Playworkers
Notes for Teachers
Notes on being helpful

Basic craft : Near rhyme

There are several sorts of combinations of sound that can take the place of rhyme. These include imperfect rhyme (spot - parrot), unaccented rhyme (butter - mother), half-rhyme (down - drowning), dissonant rhyme (bike - fight), assonance or vowel rhyme, alliteration or consonant rhyme and consonance. The easiest to play with is one of the oldest devices, alliteration.

Alliteration: Time to twist the tongue

Players pick a letter .., a personal letter, perhaps the initial of their name .. and try to write the longest sentence in which every word starts with that letter. The sentence should make sense even if it is not sensible. A good way of building such a sentence is to first construct a core phrase:

NOUN  DOGS
VERB  DESTROY
NOUN  DINOSAURS

and then surround each of the words in the phrase with adjectives and adverbs, then lengthen it by conjunction and preposition and build up supplementary phrases:

Dirty dreaming DOGS dizzily drunkenly DESTROY dangerous damp dreary DINOSAURS down disgustingly damp dungeons during dismal December days.

It will help if a first, example, sentence is constructed by the players on a blackboard or large sheet of paper. The finished sentence, and subsequent individual ones, can be written on long strips of paper and hung as banners, or rolled out as carpets.


A combination of alliteration with a version of consequences.

Players contribute two alliterating adjectives and a noun, and a further adverb alliterating with a final word, as in:

"A ragged raving robin merrily MET
eight elegant elephants incredibly IN
the wrecked red room and sweetly SAID
'What wobbly wonders with scaley SKIN'."


It can be helpful to ask players to start by deciding on the four words that end lines. This is only to give them a push and a structure, they should not feel bound by the first choice if it prevents a better work.

For further information on this sort of game click on games listed under BASIC CRAFT in the INDEX side bar.

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Windows Workshops © Dave Calder, The Windows Project ,1997,1998,1999