Chapter 3 — The Rainbow

Chapter 3 of the Class 5 English NCERT textbook (Santoor), "The Rainbow", is a two-stanza poem by Christina Rossetti that compares boats, ships, clouds, and bridges to celebrate the rainbow as the most beautiful of all — download the PDF and read a summary of the poem, its key ideas, and vocabulary exercises included in the chapter.

• The Poem by Christina Rossetti — The chapter presents a two-stanza poem in which the poet compares things that travel across water and sky. In the first stanza, boats on rivers and ships on seas are compared to clouds sailing the sky, with clouds declared prettier. In the second stanza, bridges on rivers are compared to the rainbow, which the poet calls 'the bow that bridges heaven' — a road built from earth to sky — and again declares it the most beautiful.
• The Rainbow as a Natural Bridge — The poem uses the word 'bow' to refer to the rainbow, describing it as a bridge that spans from earth to the sky and overtops the trees. This imagery helps students understand how a natural phenomenon can be seen as something grand and bridge-like, connecting the earth to the heavens.
• VIBGYOR — The Seven Colours of the Rainbow — The chapter teaches students that a rainbow has seven colours remembered by the acronym VIBGYOR: Violet, Indigo, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange, Red. It also explains that when sunlight passes through rain droplets, it splits into these seven colours to form the rainbow.
• Language and Vocabulary Work — Students practise new words from the poem — 'overtops', 'bridges', and 'bow' — and complete exercises such as rearranging scrambled letters to form words from the poem (for example, 'sial' becomes 'sail', 'nhveea' becomes 'heaven'). A word-building exercise shows how 'rain' and 'bow' join to make 'rainbow', and further compound-word pairs are explored.
• Grammar: Words as Nouns and Verbs — The chapter introduces the idea that the same word can function as both a noun and a verb, using 'bridge' as an example — 'a bridge made of roots' (noun) versus 'planks used to bridge the stream' (verb). Students then practise this with ten other words such as 'cut', 'plant', 'dance', and 'fly'.

1. 01The poem 'The Rainbow' is written by Christina Rossetti and appears in Unit 2 (My Colourful World) of the Class 5 Santoor textbook.
2. 02The poem has two stanzas: the first compares clouds to boats and ships; the second compares the rainbow to bridges built on rivers.
3. 03The rainbow is described as 'the bow that bridges heaven' and 'builds a road from earth to sky', making it the prettiest of all things mentioned.
4. 04Key new vocabulary from the poem includes the words 'overtops', 'bridges' (used as a verb), and 'bow' (used to mean rainbow).
5. 05The chapter explains VIBGYOR as the order of the rainbow's seven colours: Violet, Indigo, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange, Red.
6. 06Sunlight splitting through rain droplets produces the seven colours of the rainbow, as explained in the 'Let us Write' section of the chapter.
7. 07Isaac Newton created a spinning disc painted with the seven rainbow colours to show that white light is made of many colours — when the disc spins fast, the eye sees white.