“Where is the Bee — / Where is the Blush — / Where is the Hay?” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Emily Dickinson, for July.)
📖 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. 🖋
📖 🖋 THOREAU’S BIRTHDAY and Homeschool Journaling
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” (Happy birthday to the great American writer Henry David Thoreau, born on this day in 1817. Check him out at your local library this week.)
🖋 🕊 WONDERFUL WORDS: Liberty and Peace
“As from the East th’ illustrious King of Day, / With rising Radiance drives the Shades away, / So Freedom comes array’d with Charms divine, / And in her Train Commerce and Plenty shine.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Phillis Wheatley, for independent America.)
🖋 🇺🇸 WONDERFUL WORDS: William Emerson on “A Nation’s Strength”
“Not gold but only men can make / A people great and strong.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from William Ralph Emerson, for Independence Day.)
🖋 🚂 WONDERFUL WORDS: “It was late June”
“And for that minute a blackbird sang / Close by, and round him, mistier, / Farther and farther, all the birds / Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.” (A bonus homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Edward Thomas, for late June.)
🖋 🌞 WONDERFUL WORDS: Stevenson’s “Summer Sun”
“Above the hills, along the blue, / Round the bright air with footing true, / To please the child, to paint the rose, / The gardener of the World, he goes.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Robert Louis Stevenson, for the week of the summer solstice.)
🖋 🏰 HAPPY FATHER’S DAY WEEK from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“A whisper, and then a silence: / Yet I know by their merry eyes / They are plotting and planning together / To take me by surprise.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Longfellow, for Father’s Day.)
🖋 🇺🇸 WONDERFUL WORDS (and Music!): “O! say can you see?”
“Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam, / In full glory reflected now shines on the stream — / ‘Tis the star-spangled banner, O! long may it wave / O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Francis Scott Key, for Flag Day.)
📚 LEARNING THE LIBRARY: The Literary 800s
Explore your local library and the whole universe of knowledge with our homeschool tour of the Dewey Decimal System. This month: The Literary 800s.
🖋 🌞 WONDERFUL WORDS (and Music!): “Sumer is i-cumin in”
“Loudly sing, cuckoo!” (Our ancient homeschool poem-of-the-week, anonymously, for the beginning of our summer term.)
🖋 🌟 WONDERFUL WORDS: Hymn to the North Star
“A beauteous type of that unchanging good, / That bright eternal beacon, by whose ray / The voyager of time should shape his heedful way.” (An extra homeschool poem-of-the-week, from William Cullen Bryant, for Polaris, our Great Star for the month of May.)
🖋 “AFTER A HUNDRED YEARS / Nobody knows the Place”
“Weeds triumphant ranged / Strangers strolled and spelled / At the lone Orthography / Of the Elder Dead.” (An extra homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Emily Dickinson, for Memorial Day.)
🇺🇸 MEMORIAL DAY 2022
“Rest, comrades, rest and sleep! / The thoughts of men shall be / As sentinels to keep / Your rest from danger free.” (Little homeschool lessons in literature, history, geography, and music, for the Memorial Day weekend.)
🎂 HOMESCHOOL HOLIDAYS: Happy Birthday, Ralph! (Emerson, that is)
Invite your homeschool students to discover the work of the great American essayist, poet, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, born this day in 1803.
🖋 🎓 GRADUATION SEASON: “Set me free to find my calling”
“Bind me not to the pasture, chain me not to the plow, / Set me free to find my calling and I’ll return to you somehow.” (Our poem-of-the-week, from Marta Keen, for homeschool graduation season and the beginning of summer.)
🖋 🍃 WONDERFUL WORDS: Robert Frost’s “Birches”
“One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Robert Frost, for childhood play and growing up.)
🖋 🪺 WONDERFUL WORDS: Anne Bradstreet for Mother’s Day
“Great was my pain when I you bred, / Great was my care when I you fed. / Long did I keep you soft and warm / And with my wings kept off all harm.” (Our “ornithological” homeschool poem-of-the-week, from the early American poet Anne Bradstreet, for Mother’s Day.)
🖋 🌼 WONDERFUL WORDS: May and the Poets
“Come, ye rains, then if ye will, / May’s at home, and with me still; / But come rather, thou, good weather, / And find us in the fields together.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Leigh Hunt, for the merry month of May.)
🎂 🎭 HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WILL! (Shakespeare, That Is)
Happy birthday to the Bard! Why not celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday by exploring some of the excellent free teaching materials available from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.
🖋 🌸 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 spring.)
🇺🇸 🏇 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.)
🖋 🇺🇸 “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 Emerson, for the beginning of the American Revolution.)
🖋 ☀️ 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.)
🖖 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. And some of today’s homeschoolers will probably be around to see it!)
🌊 WONDERFUL WORDS: “It was a short, cold Christmas”
Herman Melville reminds us that even on Christmas Day, somewhere in the world there are ships and sailors heading out to sea.
📖 🦦 LOUISA MAY ALCOTT Gets a Visit From Horace the Otter
Our River Houses homeschool mascot, Horace the Otter, remembers the author of the popular American novel “Little Women” (1868) on her birthday.
👑 “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.)
