There’s a great idea that has been doing the rounds recently on social media of using riddle poems as a way to have children use all four sentence types (statement, exclamation, command, question). I thought this was a great idea as I love poetry, and so I’ve written this resource with 32 four-line poems to model to your class. The cards are set to be printed so that each child can have one riddle and then quiz other children (using quiz-quiz-trade). They could also be cut with the riddle and answer separate so that children perhaps could work in pairs with a group of riddles to try and find the matching answer.
I’ve made my own little innovation to this poetry idea in order to hit as many of the objectives on the 2017 Interim Teacher Assessment Framework for Year 2 as possible. Here’s one example poem below:
As in this example, most of the poems I’ve put together feature examples of possessive apostrophes AND also have commas used in list sentences! These are both Greater Depth objectives for Year 2. This means that a short four-line poem could tick off a HUGE stack of objectives! As an extra bonus which I think will be a big help for Year 2 pupils, I’ve set up some of the riddles so that they are multiple choice. For example, they might end with the question ‘Do you think I am a rock, a pool or a cave?’. This multiple choice approach is something you might encourage the children to use in their own riddle if they find after a bit of testing on their classmates that no-one is able to guess their answer. The extra bonus with this is that you have another chance for children to use a comma in a list here!
After modelling these example poems and doing some activities with them I’d probably do a shared write as a class or in pairs of a few examples before giving children a bank of possible objects to use for their independent writing (they could use their own idea if they prefer). The basis for your riddles could of course be linked to whatever topic you are covering at the moment (animals, famous people in History, characters from a book etc). I’d probably have children do their poem on a whiteboard first, perhaps do some peer review reading other pupils’ poems and and then see if they can improve their poem with a success check independently.
If your children really like riddles, then consider buying a book of them for the class.