‘I just want my old classroom’

Children at Sompting Abbotts Prep School have put their feelings of frustration about lockdown into their video performance of their class poem Lockdown, lockdown, tell me when?

The words talk about ‘feeling stranded’, missing friends and hugs, going ‘cross-eyed’ over Zoom and how COVID words like ‘ventilators and flattening curves’ makes them scared. They talk of ‘tempers flaring behind closed doors’ and how they dream of playing football, flying abroad and making sandcastles.
The Year 4 children practised their poem in their virtual English lessons with their teacher Mr David Buckingham and their parents recorded them all saying their lines for their video performance.

Headmaster Mr Stuart Douch said: ‘It’s a brilliant poem and they’re saying what children everywhere must be feeling. This winter lockdown has been doubly hard for children cooped up with the cold and the dark evenings. We’ve all been applauding our wonderful NHS and keyworkers. Maybe we should be clapping our children too. I think they’ve been superheroes coping with confinement, isolation and such a huge change in their normal lives and routines.’

Here are the poem words.

Lockdown, lockdown, tell me when …

Lockdown, lockdown, tell me when …

… this will all, finally, end.

All my friends are kept away

Grounded, stranded, banned from play

Lockdown, lockdown, tell me when

… this will all, finally, end.

Stuck inside with brain all wired

Home school’s making me cross-eyed

Virtual lessons all by Zoom,

I just want my old classroom,

Lockdown, lockdown, tell me when …

… this will all, finally, end.

Behind closed doors, tempers flare

When can I go out somewhere?

If only I could play football

Fly abroad, make a sand-castle …

Lockdown, lockdown, tell me when …

… this will all, finally, end.

Now the news makes me so scared,

Ventilators, flattening curves,

Bubbles, face masks, Covid rules,

Stay at home and stay indoors

Lockdown, lockdown, tell me when …

… how I long for this to end.

When the virus has been quelled

When the vaccines keep us well,

Friends I miss I’ll get to hug

And I’ll see the ones I love

Lockdown, lockdown, tell me when …

… this will all, finally, end.