A common characteristic among my students is a lack of linguistic flexibility. They struggle during sentence and word play tasks, and are concrete in their thinking. The jokes and quick verbal banter of peers usually leaves them in confusion. Often there are also limitations in reading abilities as strengths in these areas support phonological processing skills.
With the popular kid’s holiday April’s Fool around the corner, now is a good time to work with students on creating and telling jokes. I’ve put together a lesson with four activities to target vocabulary, figurative language, structural and lexical ambiguity, and perspective taking.
I start with a discussion and introduction to the concept of a riddle. I explain that “a riddle is a question that turns into a joke. It starts
with a confusing question and ends with an answer that surprises you and usually
makes you laugh.” We also discuss “punch lines”. This is a good time for children to share their jokes. If they would like, I provide a microphone and let them take their turn as stand-up comedians!
with a confusing question and ends with an answer that surprises you and usually
makes you laugh.” We also discuss “punch lines”. This is a good time for children to share their jokes. If they would like, I provide a microphone and let them take their turn as stand-up comedians!
It’s important to bring up that it is possible to understand a riddle and not find it funny. This is a good point to incorporate differing perspectives. 
Together we analyze riddles. After hearing the question part of the riddle, we each discuss what we pictured in our minds.
For a challenge, we make our own riddles as a group. We start by establishing a topic. We then generate a list of words and phrases pertaining to that topic. Students circle words that have more than one meaning.
These words are transferred to our graphic organizer where their multiple meanings are recorded. 
We then choose a homonym and make a riddle. The idea is to write a question that seems like it will be about one meaning but turns out to be about the other. For example:
What’s a baseball player’s favorite animal? A bat! 
The no-prep lessons are in my TpT store.
The article by Marcy Zipke entitled Teaching Metalinguistic Awareness and Reading Comprehension with Riddles inspired my lesson. You can read a copy here: http://www.readingrockets.org/article/28315 
