Blog Posts

Love You Forever

Denise Gagne

Love you Forever

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One of the very best Mother’s Day tributes that you could do with your students, would be to use the book “Love you Forever” by Robert Munsch.

I can’t read the book myself since I lost my mother, but I’ve used the book with children, by finding different readers for the different parts of the book.

To hear Robert Munsch sing the lullaby visit: http://robertmunsch.com/book/love-you-forever

In an assembly or a Mother’s Day tea, you could have a small group of children dramatize the story, while the rest of the children join in by singing the lullaby each time it occurs in the song. You could do as Robert Munsch suggests, and have the children write their own melody for the lullaby. If you want to use Robert Munsch’s melody, it goes like this:

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Robert Munsch says about the book:
Love You Forever started as a song.

“I’ll love you forever,
I’ll like you for always,
as long as I’m living
my baby you’ll be.”

I made that up after my wife and I had two babies born dead. The song was my song to my dead babies. For a long time I had it in my head and I couldn’t even sing it because every time I tried to sing it I cried. It was very strange having a song in my head that I couldn’t sing.

For a long time it was just a song but one day, while telling stories at a big theatre at the University of Guelph, it occurred to me that I might be able to make a story around the song.

Out popped Love You Forever, pretty much the way it is in the book.

My regular publisher felt that it was not really a kid’s book and I ended up doing it with another publisher.

One day the publisher called up and said “This is very strange. It is selling very well in retirement communities in Arizona. It is selling in retirement communities where kids are illegal. This is supposed to be a children’s book. What is going on?”

“Grownups are buying it for grownups!”

In fact, it turned out that parents buy it for grandparents and grandparents buy it for parents and kids buy it for everybody and everybody buys it for kids. As a matter of fact, everybody buys it for everybody. That’s why it sells a lot of copies. I think it’s my best book. So far it has sold about 15,000,000 copies.