“And smale foweles maken melodye, / That slepen al the nyght with open ye / (So priketh hem Nature in hir corages).” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Chaucer, for April.)
🖋 Homeschool Poems-of-the-Week (Post Archives)
A collection of great homeschool teaching ideas, resources, and little lessons on poets 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 to follow along with us! 😊
🖋 WONDERFUL WORDS: A Shakespearean Sonnet a Day from Patrick Stewart
Patrick Stewart — Star Trek’s Captain Picard and also a noted Shakespearean actor — reads Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
🖋 🌱 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 early spring.)
🖋 🗡 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 homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Constantine Cavafy, for the Ides of March.)
🖋 🔭 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 homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Wallace Stevens, for the earliest migrants of spring.)
🖋 🔭 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 astronomers.)
🖋 🌠 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 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 homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Emily Dickinson, for Valentine Week.) ❤️
🖋 ❄️ 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.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Robert Frost, for wintry February — with a special lesson on rhyme-scheme mapping!)
🖋 🚀 REMEMBERING CHALLENGER
“And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover, / And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from John Masefield, for the Challenger Seven.)
🖋 🎵 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 homeschool poem-of-the-week, from James Weldon Johnson, for Martin Luther King’s birthday.)
