“Dark and dull night, fly hence away, / And give the honor to this day, / That sees December turned to May.” (A modern Christmas masterpiece, with ancient words by Robert Herrick and new music by John Rutter, for Homeschool Holiday Music Month.)
📖 Homeschool Language & Literature
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: The Hunter Home From the Hill
“’Tis evening on the moorland free, / The starlit wave is still: / Home is the sailor from the sea, / The hunter from the hill.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from A.E. Housman, for the beginning of Orion Term.)
🖋 🦃 WONDERFUL WORDS: Delicious “Thanksgiving Magic”
“Oh, some like magic made by wands, / And some read magic out of books, / And some like fairy spells and charms / But I like magic made by cooks!” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Rowena Bastin Bennett, for Thanksgiving!)
🇺🇸 HOMESCHOOL HISTORY: Seven Score and Nineteen Years Ago
“What place is this? Where are we now?” (Marking the 159th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, with help from Ken Burns and Carl Sandburg.)
🖋 🌠 WONDERFUL WORDS: Of Poems and Meteors
“Stars, I have seen them fall, / But when they drop and die / No star is lost at all / From all the star-sown sky.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from A.E. Housman, for the annual Leonid meteor shower.)
🖋 🕊 THE ELEVENTH DAY of the Eleventh Month: We Will Remember Them
“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: / Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. / At the going down of the sun and in the morning / We will remember them.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Laurence Binyon, for Veterans Day and Armistice Day.)
🌞 🌏 🌕 WONDERFUL WORDS: “The stellar gauge of earthly show”
“Is such the stellar gauge of earthly show, / Nation at war with nation, brains that teem, / Heroes, and women fairer than the skies?” (An extra homeschool poem-of-the-week, a sonnet-masterpiece from Thomas Hardy, for this week’s lunar eclipse.)
🖋 🇺🇸 WONDERFUL WORDS: America’s Choosing Day
“These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships.” (An extra homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Walt Whitman, for the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.)
🖋 🍂 WONDERFUL WORDS: A Leaf-Treader
“I have been treading on leaves all day until I am autumn-tired. / God knows all the color and form of leaves I have trodden on and mired.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Robert Frost, for the falling leaves.)
👻 HOMESCHOOL SPOOKIDAYS: Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore”
Light a candle, turn out the lights, and let Edgar Allan Poe entertain you and your homeschool students this Halloween.
👑 “FROM THIS DAY to the ending of the world”
“This day is call’d the feast of Crispian.” (Celebrate some Shakespearean history in your homeschool on this St. Crispin’s Day.)
⚔️ “THIS STORY shall the good man teach his son“
“He that shall live this day and see old age, will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours, and say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispin’s.'” (A homeschool toast to offer from this day to the ending of the world.)
🖋 🌅 WONDERFUL WORDS (and Music!): Turning Toward the Morning
“If I had a thing to give you, / I would tell you one more time / That the world is always turning / Toward the morning.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Gordon Bok, for late October.)
🖋 🍏 🍎 WONDERFUL WORDS: After Apple-Picking
“I am overtired / Of the great harvest I myself desired.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Robert Frost, for apple season.)
🎵 🍎 WONDERFUL WORDS (and Music!): My Orchard in Linden Lea
“I be free to go abroad / Or take again my homeward road / To where for me the apple tree / Do lean down low in Linden Lea.” (A bonus poem-of-the-week, from William Barnes and Ralph Vaughan Williams, for apple season and Vaughan Williams’ birthday.)
🖋 🌹 WONDERFUL WORDS: “The Frosts were her condition”
“The Tyrian would not come / Until the North — invoke it.” (Our autumnal homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Emily Dickinson, for all late bloomers.)
🌰 🌽 🍎 WONDERFUL WORDS: “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”
“Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find / Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, / Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from John Keats, for fall.)
🗓 HOMESCHOOL CALENDARS: “Thirty days hath September . . .”
“. . . April, June, and November.” (There’s no better week than this to teach your students the ancient calendrical verse that every young homeschooler should know.)
🖋 🍃 WONDERFUL WORDS: “Our Summer made her light escape”
![[Emily Dickinson Homestead]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/dickinson-homestead-150x113.jpg)
“And thus, without a Wing / Or service of a Keel / Our Summer made her light escape / Into the Beautiful.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Emily Dickinson, for the end of summer.)
🖋 🦋 WONDERFUL WORDS: The Tuft of Flowers
“‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart, / ‘Whether they work together or apart.’” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Robert Frost, for late-summer mowing, the Monarch butterfly migration, and all of us working together, whether we work together or apart.)
🖋 🍁 WONDERFUL WORDS: Song at the Beginning of Autumn
![[Elizabeth Jennings]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/elizabeth-jennings-110x150.jpg)
“But I am carried back against / My will into a childhood where / Autumn is bonfires, marbles, smoke; / I lean against my window fenced / From evocations in the air. / When I said autumn, autumn broke.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Elizabeth Jennings, for the coming fall.)
🖋 🏡 “A HANDSOME HOUSE to lodge a friend, a river at my garden’s end”
“I’ve often wished that I had clear, / For life, six hundred pounds a year, / A handsome house to lodge a friend, / A river at my garden’s end.” (Introducing our first homeschool poem-of-the-week for the new school year, from Horace via Jonathan Swift — and it’s our official River Houses motto, too!)
🖋 🏡 ENVOY: A Living River by the Door
“Go, little book, and wish to all / Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall, / A living river by the door, / A nightingale in the sycamore.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Robert Louis Stevenson, for the end of the 2021–2022 River Houses year.)
🖋 🌞 WONDERFUL WORDS: “Poor, middle-agèd summer!”
“Poor, middle-agèd summer! Vain this show! / Whole fields of golden-rod cannot offset / One meadow with a single violet.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Helen Hunt Jackson, for late summer.)
🖋 🌠 WONDERFUL WORDS: A Star in a Stoneboat
“From following walls I never lift my eye, / Except at night to places in the sky / Where showers of charted meteors let fly.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Robert Frost, for this month’s Perseid meteor shower.)
🖋 🍻 WONDERFUL WORDS: To the Meteor Rolling Home
“Of thee we think, in a ring we link; / To the shearer of ocean’s fleece we drink, / And the ‘Meteor’ rolling home.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Herman Melville, for his birthday, and for this month’s Perseid meteor shower.)
🖋 🔔 WONDERFUL WORDS: As Kingfishers Catch Fire
“Like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s / Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Gerard Manley Hopkins, for his birthday and for the halcyon days of summer.)
