Read The Puffin Book of Nonsense Verse free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
The Puffin Book of Nonsense Verse, chosen by Quentin Blake, is a big bouncy bag of silly poems for 5 year olds and whoever is reading aloud to them.
It's a collection of comic poems, old and new, sorted into sections with names like A Recipe for Indigestion and Chortling and Galumphing.
The famous ones are all here. There's Jabberwocky, The Owl and the Pussy-Cat and Spike Milligan's On the Ning Nang Nong.
But it's the less famous ones that steal the show. Two dead men get up to fight. Somebody goes to the pictures tomorrow and takes a front seat at the back. Ebenezer Bleezer sells ice-cream in flavours like tuna taco and liver lava.
Roger McGough recommends a certain dog-flavoured pudding with cream. Would you try it? (We wouldn't.)
It's a proper read-aloud book. Some poems are only four lines long, perfect for one more at bedtime. Others, like The Walrus and the Carpenter, run on and on.
Half the fun is the language. Loads of the words aren't real words at all, so nobody knows quite how to say them, grown-ups included. One poem goes back hundreds of years and is still spelled the old way.
Some of the jokes are dark in a cartoonish way. A head turns up in a bread box. A brother tries to stew his sister. One poem has a cook curry the page boy!
Most children find that sort of thing very funny. If yours takes things very literally, you might skip a few and save them for later.
It's a lovely one to dip into rather than read straight through. You'll probably find your own favourites to read again and again.
If the gruesome ones get the biggest giggles, Revolting Rhymes is Roald Dahl doing much the same to fairy tales. (His greedy Centipede has a poem in this collection too.)
A library hand-picked by an English teacher, delivered through a calm, ad-free app. If your child already loves reading, we keep up.
7-day free trial. Then £7.99/month.
