Some rituals are worth repeating. One of them, to my mind, is the Read-a-thon staged each year by the Hosmer School in Watertown. Invited to be a guest reader again this spring, I met last week with the fifth graders in Ms. Christine Kennedy’s class.

This year, I thought that it might be particularly difficult to attract and hold the children’s attention. They had just finished taking the MCAS test now required of all public school students. How would they respond, at the end of what had been for them a demanding morning?

Entering the classroom, I found the children sitting on the floor in a half circle, ready and waiting for me. It struck me then, as it always does, how sharply today’s schools differ from the ones I attended as a boy. Miss McDonough, my fifth-grade teacher, was a hardnosed taskmaster whose charges would never have been invited, or allowed, to sit on the floor.

Memories of my own fifth-grade experience prompted my first question to the children. I promised a prize for the right answer. “What year,” I asked, “was I a fifth grader in a Watertown public school?” The first guess was 1953, a stab not absurdly far off. To my astonishment, the second guesser scored a direct hit: 1940.

That an eleven-year-old could produce the correct date astounded me. Reaching back into unfamiliar history like that takes flexibility of mind. The student who pulled off this trick received the first of the many prizes I had brought along that morning.

I had chosen to read poetry, and to start with short, easy and amusing works. That’s why Ogden Nash seemed a good point of departure. So I first read the students three brief, light pieces: The Lama, The Fly (“The Lord in His wisdom made the fly/And then forgot to tell us why”), and The Eel (“I don’t mind eels/Except as meals/And the way they feels).

Then we moved on to the same poet’s precious, multi-stanzared, masterpiece: The Tale of Custard the Dragon. Custard is a “realio, trulio, little pet dragon” belonging to a small girl named Belinda. Until the climactic event in the story Custard is a coward, longing for a nice safe cage.

But all that changes when a nasty pirate climbs through Belinda’s window. Faced with this peril, Belinda’s other pets flee but not Custard. No, this alleged coward jumps up and devours the pirate at a gulp. He then reverts to character and cries again for his cage.

Only one of the children was familiar with this staple of childhood reading but all of the kids seemed transfixed by it during my reading. Its sprightly rhythm and overall playfulness commended it to their attention. Yes, poetry can be fun.

But poetry must challenge as well. That motivated me to move to poets who might stretch the children’s powers of understanding. EE Cummings, Robert Frost, Billy Collins, and James Tate were some of the others we read.

Cummings I introduced as a boy who grew up a few blocks from where I live in Cambridge. He went to the then Agassiz School in my neighborhood and underwent taunting by some of the local toughs. More to the point, he was an innovator, I explained, a writer who loved to break with the conventional by breaking with capital letters, among other ploys.

Though the morning outside the classroom was rainy and raw, I wanted to honor spring with Cummings’s ode to the season. So I read “I thank you God for most this amazing day,” emphasizing the poet’s thanks for “everything which is yes.” A short dialogue helped the children appreciate what that affirmation can mean.

When we came to Billy Collins, the former Poet Laureate, I read his “Afternoon With Irish Cows.” Its images can be followed easily, but the most significant line is more difficult to grasp. The poet interprets one cow’s bellowing cry as expressing the “large, unadulterated cowness of herself.”

There was more, much more, but this slice of an amazing morning can serve to underline the value of intergenerational contacts. No wonder most grandparents feel wildly enthusiastic about their children’s children, and the latter’s children too.

It’s only elementary to find value in association with the young, no matter how many decades our juniors they are. Once again, I have found it not only entertaining to talk with them but invigorating as well. If you welcome the spirit of rejuvenation, what is better than such encounters with the young?

George Bernard Shaw cleverly remarked that youth is wasted on the young, but the reality is that many children make the gift of youth look good. If we elders are their future selves, they can be seen as our past, present, and future.

To me, it has once again come as reassurance: 76 can talk with 11, and 11 can talk with 76, and both can emerge better for the exchange.

Richard Griffin