Happy birthday to the Bard! Celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday this week with some free teaching materials from Shakespeare’s birthplace itself.
📖 Homeschool Language & Literature: Easy Lessons for the Whole Year
Thou hast taught me, Silent River!
Many a lesson, deep and long;
Thou hast been a generous giver;
I can give thee but a song.
Great homeschool teaching tips and easy little lessons on language, literature, and poetry from the River Houses Homeschool Network. Add your name to our free River Houses mailing list to get posts like these delivered right to your mailbox every week, and print your own homeschool poetry calendar for the whole year on our main River Houses calendar page. 😊
❡ Here, said the year: This collection of Language & Literature posts also includes our regular series of Homeschool Poems-of-the-Week. 🖋
🖋 🌸 WONDERFUL WORDS: Loveliest of Trees
“And since to look at things in bloom / Fifty springs are little room, / About the woodlands I will go / To see the cherry hung with snow.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from A.E. Housman, for the loveliest of trees.)
🇺🇸 🏇 WONDERFUL WORDS: “The fate of a nation was riding that night”
“A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark, / And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark / Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet: / That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light, / The fate of a nation was riding that night.” (A bonus homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Longfellow, for the beginning of the American Revolution in 1775.)
🖋 🇺🇸 WONDERFUL WORDS: “Here once the embattled farmers stood”
“By the rude bridge that arched the flood, / Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, / Here once the embattled farmers stood / And fired the shot heard round the world.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Ralph Waldo Emerson, for the beginning of the American Revolution in 1775.)
🖋 ☀️ WONDERFUL WORDS: Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day
“May memory restore again and again / The smallest color of the smallest day: / Time is the school in which we learn, / Time is the fire in which we burn.” (Our Heraclitean homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Delmore Schwartz, for April days.)
🖋 🎨 HOMESCHOOL ARTS & LITERATURE: William Wordsworth’s Lake District
On William Wordsworth’s birthday, why not introduce your homeschool students to the famous Lake District of England, a region that has inspired writers and visual artists for more than 200 years.
🖖 HOMESCHOOL HOLIDAYS: Happy First Contact Day!
“Sure on this shining night / I weep for wonder wand’ring far alone / Of shadows on the stars.” (On this day in the year 2063, in a remote area near Bozeman, Montana, a Vulcan survey ship will make first contact with the human race. Perhaps some of today’s homeschoolers will be there to see it.)
🖋 ☔️ WONDERFUL WORDS: “Whan that Aprill…”
“And smale foweles maken melodye / That slepen al the nyght with open ye / (So priketh hem Nature in hir corages).” (Our ancient homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Geoffrey Chaucer, for April showers.)
🖋 🕊 WONDERFUL WORDS: George Herbert’s “Easter Wings”
“O let me rise / As larks, harmoniously, / And sing this day thy victories: / Then shall the fall further the flight in me.” (A bonus homeschool poem-of-the-week, from George Herbert, for Easter.)
🖋 🌱 WONDERFUL WORDS: Nothing Gold Can Stay
“Nature’s first green is gold, / Her hardest hue to hold.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Robert Frost, for his birthday and for the first signs of spring.)
🎭 HOMESCHOOL HISTORY & LITERATURE: “Lend Me Your Ears!”
Why not wrap up this special Julius Caesar Week in your homeschool by viewing and discussing several versions of a famous Shakespearean speech with your students.
🖋 🗡 WONDERFUL WORDS: The Ides of March
“And if you can’t curb your ambitions, / at least pursue them hesitantly, cautiously. / And the higher you go, / the more searching and careful you need to be.” (Our admonitory homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Constantine Cavafy, for the Ides of March. Beware!)
🗡 HOMESCHOOL HISTORY & LITERATURE: ”Beware the Ides of March“
Let Shakespeare help you and your students remember one of the most famous dates in ancient history: the Ides of March in 44 B.C.
🖋 🔭 WONDERFUL WORDS: When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
“Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, / In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, / Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Walt Whitman, contrariwise, for John Herschel and Albert Einstein.)
🖋 🏔 WONDERFUL WORDS: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
“The river is moving. / The blackbird must be flying.” (Our playful homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Wallace Stevens, for the earliest birds of spring.)
🎉 📖 WONDERFUL WORDS: Happy Dord Day!
“Lexicógrapher. n.s. [λεξικὸν and γράφω; lexicographe, French.] A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.” (A humorous homeschool holiday, for all lovers of words and dictionaries.)
🔭 WONDERFUL WORDS: Watchers of the Skies
“Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes / He star’d at the Pacific — and all his men / Look’d at each other with a wild surmise — / Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from John Keats, for all homeschool stargazers.)
🖋 🌠 WONDERFUL WORDS: The Truly Great
“Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun / And left the vivid air signed with their honour.” (Our transmigrational homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Stephen Spender, for the great birthdays of February.)
🖋 ❤️ WONDERFUL WORDS: “Unwind the solemn twine, and tie my Valentine!”
“Awake ye muses nine, sing me a strain divine!” (Our romantic homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Emily Dickinson, for Valentine Week.)
📚 LEARNING THE LIBRARY: The Linguistic 400s
Explore your local library and the whole universe of knowledge with our homeschool tour of the Dewey Decimal System. This month: the Linguistic 400s.
🖋 ❄️ WONDERFUL WORDS: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
“The woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Robert Frost, for wintry February — with a special lesson on rhyme-scheme mapping!)
🖋 🌊 HOMESCHOOL HISTORY & LITERATURE: Remembering Challenger
“I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, / And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from John Masefield, for the Challenger Seven of 1986.)
🖋 🇺🇸 WONDERFUL WORDS (and Music!): Lift Every Voice and Sing
“Let our rejoicing rise / High as the listening skies, / Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.” (Our patriotic homeschool poem-of-the-week, from James Weldon Johnson, for the Martin Luther King holiday.)
🖋 ⛸ WONDERFUL WORDS: A Winter Poem for Homeschool Dads
“She thinks she’ll never / be so happy, for who else will find her graceful, / find her perfect, skate with her / in circles outside the emptied rink forever?” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Gail Mazur, for all homeschool fathers.)
🖋 🌨 WONDERFUL WORDS: An Unexpected “Snow-Storm”
“All friends shut out, the housemates sit / Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed / In a tumultuous privacy of storm.” (A bonus homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Ralph Waldo Emerson, for unexpected blizzards.)
🎵 🎭 TWELFTH NIGHT and the End of Homeschool Holiday Music Month
“Long long ago the world begun, / With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain. / But that’s all one, our play is done, / And we’ll strive to please you every day.” (Shakespeare helps us bring the Christmas Season, and our own Homeschool Holiday Music Month, to a close.)
🖋 ❄️ WONDERFUL WORDS: “What so soon will wake and grow”
“They could not grasp it if they knew, / What so soon will wake and grow / Utterly unlike the snow.” (Our hopeful homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Philip Larkin, for all things born in January.)