Where Go the Boats?

Robert Louis Stevenson

Teacher card

Published: 1885, in A Child's Garden of Verses
Length: 16 lines, 69 words, 1 word in 35 is long
Year band: Reading load: Years 3–4. A guide from word length, not a curriculum level.
Themes: rain
Time: 5–10 min, depending on the activity

The text

Dark brown is the river,Golden is the sand.It flows along for ever,With trees on either hand.

Green leaves a-floating,Castles of the foam,Boats of mine a-boating—Where will all come home?

On goes the riverAnd out past the mill,Away down the valley,Away down the hill.

Away down the river,A hundred miles or more,Other little childrenShall bring my boats ashore.

Robert Louis Stevenson (died 1894), A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), lines 679–697 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 the sky in the weather poemsin weatherline · 16 lines · about 5–10 min
Task for students (you can change the sentence before you print; nothing is saved)See where weatherline takes lines from this poem, then read today's poem the sky has chosen.
See where weatherline takes lines from this poem, then read today's poem the sky has chosen.
weatherline.popplepoetry.com/sources#rl-boats

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-where-go-the-boats · popplepoetry.com