The other day I received an email from third-year college student Matthew Hodges in the UK. He was given an assignment of creating an animation to promote poetry to eight-year-old students. After researching children’s poetry on the Internet, he decided to create a video of my poem “My Puppy Punched Me in the Eye,” from my book My Hippo Has the Hiccups.

Along with Editor Danny Buttigeig and Photographer Gemma Rafferty, Matthew spent two weeks creating this video, which took 900 frames and “rather a lot of plasticene” (what we call “modeling clay” here in the US). The result is a fun “claymation” video that I’m proud to share on poetry4kids.

If you’ve created an animated video using one of my poems, or if you’ve seen one that you like, please drop me a line and let me know about it. I’d love to see it and maybe even share it with my readers.

Video: My Hamster Has a Skateboard

A few months ago, I was a guest on Renee LaTulippe’s terrific children’s poetry blog, No Water River. While I was there I recited the poem “My Hamster Has a Skateboard” from my book The Tighty-Whitey Spider: And More Wacky Animal Poems I Totally Made Up. Just in case you missed it, I thought I would post the video of the poem here as well. I hope you enjoy it!

It’s time once again for a new animated video. This one is of my poem “My Brother’s Not a Werewolf.” With fun, bouncy music by Sergei Stern and awesome animation by Stephan Krosecz, I hope you’ll enjoy watching this one over and over. If you like, you can even click on the “CC” (closed captioning) button to read along as you listen to the poem.

New Videos Created by Readers

While poking around on YouTube this morning, I came across three new videos that readers had made of my poems. What struck me as most interested about these three videos is how different they all are from one another. I am always impressed at the creativity kids put into creating videos. Watch these and you’ll see what I mean.

This first one, using my poem Today I Wrote this Poem (from My Hippo Has the Hiccups), displays the poem one line at a time, while also showing lines from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to demonstrate the particular poetic technique mentioned in my poem.

The second video is a young girl rapping my poem Beavers in the Bathroom from my book The Tighty-Whitey Spider. She has apparently practiced quite a bit with this poem, as she recites it quickly and with no mistakes.

The final poem is an animation of the poem Gerbil, Gerbil, On the Run, also from The Tighty-Whitey Spider. I was so impressed with this animation. I’d love to find out how it was created because it has such fun text animation effects.

There are so many different ways to create videos from poems. If you happen to create a video of one of my poems, please drop me a line and let me know about it. I would love to see what you have done.

Here’s my latest animated video. I had so much fun creating this one and I think you’ll see why when you play it. Have fun!

Note:  If you’d like to read along with the poem, click on the “cc” button at the bottom of the video once it starts playing.

How to Rhyme

A video poetry-writing lesson

The first in a series of videos demonstrating different aspects of poetry writing for elementary students, this video shows what a rhyme is (and what is NOT a rhyme). It gives examples of different types of rhymes, and it demonstrates where to put rhyming words when writing a poem.

For quite some time I’ve wanted to create animated videos of my poems. Here is the first in what I hope will be a long series of videos, “My Parents Sent Me to the Store.”

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Taking over the world can be loads of fun, especially when you’re learning to construct giant space lasers, blow up the moon, rip the fabric of space-time, invent nano-robot armies, and create mutant zombie kitten viruses. Step 8 of The Ultimate Top Secret Guide to Taking Over the World will teach you how to do all of these and more.

In your quest for ultimate power, you’re going to need to create armies of giant, slobbering mutant monsters and lots of minions to do your bidding. Step 7 of The Ultimate Top Secret Guide to Taking Over the World is the perfect resource for learning how to clone monsters and recruit minions. Get it now before it’s too late.