Playing With Your Food Poem Lesson

Football

Here’s a quick and easy poetry writing lesson that can be used as early as first grade. I call it a “playing with your food” poem. It’s a list poem about playing your favorite sports with your favorite foods.

Step 1: Create a list of  five of your favorite sports, like this:

  • Basketball
  • Soccer
  • Baseball
  • Volleyball
  • Football


Step 2: Create a list of five of your favorite foods, like this:

  • Pizza
  • Cake
  • Candy
  • Cheese
  • Steak

Hint: Make sure that two of the foods in your list rhyme with each other, like steak / cake. If you can’t think of any foods that rhyme, you can always look at this List of Rhyming Foods.

Step 3: Arrange your two lists with the word “with” between the words of each list, as I’ve done below. The reason for this is to say that you are playing each sport with each food.

Basketball with pizza.
Soccer with cake.
Baseball with candy.
Volleyball with cheese.
Football with steak.

Step 4: Rearrange your lines so that you have rhyming foods on the second line and the fourth line of your poem. For example, you might simply swap the words cheese and steak, so the poem reads like this:

  1. Basketball with pizza.
  2. Soccer with cake.
  3. Baseball with candy.
  4. Volleyball with steak.
  5. Football with cheese.

Step 5: Write a two-line ending for your poem. Since this is  a poem about playing with your food, a good ending might be something like this:

Nothing is better than
playing with your food.

or like this:

Playing with your food
is really, really fun.

Step 6: Find a word that rhymes with the last word at the end of your poem. For example, good rhymes for food might be dude, mood, or rude. Good rhymes for fun might be bun or run.

Step 7: Finish your poem. Write a line that goes right before the last two lines. Make sure that this line ends with your rhyming word. This will give you a complete poem, something like this:

Basketball with pizza.
Soccer with cake.
Baseball with candy.
Volleyball with steak.

Football with cheese.
This is awesome, dude!
Nothing is better than
playing with your food.

or perhaps something like this:

Basketball with pizza.
Soccer with cake.
Baseball with candy.
Volleyball with steak.

Football with cheese.
I like to eat and run.
Playing with your food
is really, really fun.

Improving Your Poem

Now that you’ve completed your first draft, here are a couple of ways you can make it even better.

Add Some Alliterations

“Alliteration” is when the beginning consonant sounds of words are the same. For example, “pizza” is a food begins with a “p” sound. If you also had a sport that began with a “p” sound, the sport and the food would be an alliteration, such as:

Ping pong with pizza.

Notice that it’s the beginning sound of the words, not the beginning letter, that matters. In other words, even though the word “cake” starts with the letter “c,” it begins with a “k” sound because it’s a hard “c.” So for the second line of this poem, you would choose a sport that starts with a “k” sound, such as:

Kickball with cake.

For each line, you can change the name of the sport or the food to make an alliteration. Just make sure you keep your rhyming foods! If all of your sports and foods were alliterations, your poem might read something like this:

Ping pong with pizza.
Kickball with cake.
Baseball with bananas.
Soccer with steak.

Football with French fries.
This is awesome, dude!
Nothing is better than
playing with your food.

Make Your Poem Longer

You can make your poem longer by adding another stanza — four more lines — the beginning or middle of the poem. To do this, you’ll just need four more sports and four more foods. Remember, though, two of your foods will need to rhyme with each other. Here’s an example of what this poem might look like if it were just one stanza longer:

Ping pong with pizza.
Kickball with cake.
Baseball with bananas.
Soccer with steak.

Swimming with spaghetti.
Hiking with ham.
Bowling with baloney.
Judo with jam.

Football with French fries.
This is awesome, dude!
Nothing is better than
playing with your food.

Now it’s your turn to create your own “playing with your food” poem. Have fun!

Kenn Nesbitt
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