Farewell to the Farm

Robert Louis Stevenson

Teacher card

Published: 1885, in A Child's Garden of Verses
Length: 16 lines, 93 words, 1 word in 16 is long
Year band: Reading load: Years 5–6. A guide from word length, not a curriculum level.
Themes: retirement
Time: 5–10 min, depending on the activity

The text

The coach is at the door at last;The eager children, mounting fastAnd kissing hands, in chorus sing:Good-bye, good-bye, to everything!

To house and garden, field and lawn,The meadow-gates we swang upon,To pump and stable, tree and swing,Good-bye, good-bye, to everything!

And fare you well for evermore,O ladder at the hayloft door,O hayloft where the cobwebs cling,Good-bye, good-bye, to everything!

Crack goes the whip, and off we go;The trees and houses smaller grow;Last, round the woody turn we swing:Good-bye, good-bye, to everything!

Robert Louis Stevenson (died 1894), A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), lines 1352–1370 of Project Gutenberg ebook #25609. Public domain in Australia: the author died before 1955. Copied word for word and checked against the ebook.

What to do with it

One link and one task line for each activity. Send a student the one you want them to do, or print this page and hand it round; each link has a QR code.

Its lines are dealt for names in posy cardsin posy · 16 lines · about 5–10 min
Task for students (you can change the sentence before you print; nothing is saved)See how posy takes lines from this poem, then make a card for someone using them.
See how posy takes lines from this poem, then make a card for someone using them.
posy.popplepoetry.com/sources#rl-farewell

Send the whole hand-out

This page’s link. Students open it, read the text and pick what to do; nothing asks them to sign in.

Link for the whole text

https://popplepoetry.com/find/stevenson-farewell-to-the-farm · popplepoetry.com