Rudyard Kipling's If - Reading and Creative Writing

Rudyard Kipling’s poem IF is an inspirational poem to use with all children in Years 5 and 6 as it encourages the children to be confident even when life is difficult and to be the best that they can be. Despite being written over 100 years ago, its message of how we should lead our lives with courage, humility and perseverance is stronger than ever when considering the pressures of modern life for young people.

The two lessons in this Smart Notebook with 29 slides are ideally suited to the summer term, encouraging the children to reflect back on lessons from the previous year either as they move onto new classes or a new school.

Although the lessons have tended to be used as English lessons, it is also suitable for PSHE when teaching about taking responsibility, perseverance or social/peer pressures or even within circle time lessons.

The structure of the lessons are as follows:

• looking at conditional sentences in a variety of contexts e.g. humorous, logical, useless;

• comparing and contrasting two videos where the poem is read aloud;

• identifying the meaning of different stanzas, as well as the poem as a whole;

• its relevance in different contexts and with different characters.

• shared writing of a stanza based on life in school;

• children writing their own poem;

• self and peer evaluation.