A wonderful poem to share with nine year old’s

The prolific children’s writer Allan Ahlberg grew up, by his own admission, with “a fair few clips round the ear, no books and not much conversation.” But that hasn’t stopped him from writing over 140 books for children, many of which his wife illustrated. With his benchmark sense of humour and warmth, one of his poems is called ‘Things I have been doing lately’ and relays a series of anecdotal activities, told from the perspective of an almost ten year old child. I couldn’t resist using this with a group of Year Five’s today. They produced their own poems (amidst a large amount of raucous laughter) and then chose their favourite line to come up with a whole class poem. Here it is (and no, the boy who wrote the first line hasn’t hit manhood early, he was just a bit of a joker!):

Things we have been doing lately

Shaving my beard

Sliding into the bathtub

Shaving my cat’s back

Trying to get a weird feeling

Singing to jazz music

Acting really mad, but trying not to be bad

Cooking BBQ flavour pizza

Pretending to laugh like this – heesh heesh

Eating flying termites

Rolling my cat down the stairs

Eating one hundred and fifty six sweets

Drawing beautiful cartoons, and swimming in the afternoons

Splashing hummus on my dog

Turning my eyelids inside out.

Tee hee, love it 🙂

Yr 5, Hillcrest School