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You are here: Home > Homeschool Language & Literature > Poems-of-the-Week

🖋 Homeschool Poetry: Literary Lessons for the Whole Year

Wonderful little lessons on poets and poetry for every week of the year, from the River Houses Homeschool Network. Follow this miniature curriculum for just a few minutes each week to enlarge your students' understanding of language, literature, history, and more. It's ideal for homeschool high schoolers and for homeschool parents as well! Print your own copy of our annual River Houses Poetry Calendar on our main calendar page, and add your name to our River Houses mailing list to get more great homeschool teaching tips delivered right to your mailbox every week. 😊

🖋 🌞 WONDERFUL WORDS (and Music!): “Sumer is i-cumin in”

1 June 2023 by Bob O'Hara

“Loudly sing, cuckoo!” (Our ancient homeschool poem-of-the-week, anonymously, for the beginning of our summer term.)

Filed Under: Homeschool Arts & Music, Homeschool Language & Literature, Poems-of-the-Week

🇺🇸 🖋 “AFTER A HUNDRED YEARS / Nobody knows the Place”

27 May 2023 by Bob O'Hara

“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.)

Filed Under: Homeschool Holidays & History, Homeschool Language & Literature, Poems-of-the-Week

🖋 🎓 GRADUATION SEASON: “Set me free to find my calling”

22 May 2023 by Bob O'Hara

“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 homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Marta Keen, for graduation season and the coming summer.)

Filed Under: Homeschool Arts & Music, Homeschool Holidays & History, Homeschool Language & Literature, Poems-of-the-Week, The Homeschool Year

🖋 🌟 WONDERFUL WORDS: Hymn to the North Star

20 May 2023 by Bob O'Hara

“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 astronomical homeschool poem-of-the-week, from William Cullen Bryant, for Polaris, our Great Star for the month of May.)

Filed Under: Homeschool Astronomy, Homeschool Language & Literature, Monthly Great Stars, Poems-of-the-Week

🖋 🍃 WONDERFUL WORDS: Robert Frost’s “Birches”

15 May 2023 by Bob O'Hara

“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.)

Filed Under: Homeschool Language & Literature, Poems-of-the-Week

🖋 🪺 WONDERFUL WORDS: Anne Bradstreet for Mother’s Day

8 May 2023 by Bob O'Hara

“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, the second Sunday in May.)

Filed Under: Homeschool Holidays & History, Homeschool Language & Literature, Poems-of-the-Week

📚 🌼 WONDERFUL WORDS: May and the Poets

1 May 2023 by Bob O'Hara

“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.)

Filed Under: Homeschool Books & Libraries, Homeschool Language & Literature, Poems-of-the-Week

🖋 🌸 WONDERFUL WORDS: Loveliest of Trees

22 April 2023 by Bob O'Hara

“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.)

Filed Under: Homeschool Language & Literature, Homeschool Natural History, Poems-of-the-Week

🇺🇸 🏇 WONDERFUL WORDS: “The fate of a nation was riding that night”

16 April 2023 by Bob O'Hara

“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.)

Filed Under: Homeschool Holidays & History, Homeschool Language & Literature, Poems-of-the-Week

🖋 🇺🇸 WONDERFUL WORDS: “Here once the embattled farmers stood”

15 April 2023 by Bob O'Hara

“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.)

Filed Under: Homeschool Holidays & History, Homeschool Language & Literature, Poems-of-the-Week

🖋 🕊 WONDERFUL WORDS: George Herbert’s “Easter Wings”

9 April 2023 by Bob O'Hara

“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.)

Filed Under: Homeschool Books & Libraries, Homeschool Holidays & History, Homeschool Language & Literature, Poems-of-the-Week

🖋 ☀️ WONDERFUL WORDS: Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day

8 April 2023 by Bob O'Hara

“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.)

Filed Under: Homeschool Language & Literature, Poems-of-the-Week

🖋 ☔️ WONDERFUL WORDS: “Whan that Aprill…”

1 April 2023 by Bob O'Hara

“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.)

Filed Under: Homeschool Language & Literature, Poems-of-the-Week

🖋 🌱 WONDERFUL WORDS: Nothing Gold Can Stay

22 March 2023 by Bob O'Hara

“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.)

Filed Under: Homeschool Language & Literature, Poems-of-the-Week

🖋 🗡 WONDERFUL WORDS: The Ides of March

15 March 2023 by Bob O'Hara

“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!)

Filed Under: Homeschool Language & Literature, Poems-of-the-Week

🖋 🔭 WONDERFUL WORDS: When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

8 March 2023 by Bob O'Hara

“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.)

Filed Under: Homeschool Astronomy, Homeschool Language & Literature, Poems-of-the-Week

🖋 🌨 WONDERFUL WORDS: An Unexpected “Snow-Storm”

3 March 2023 by Bob O'Hara

“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.)

Filed Under: Homeschool Language & Literature, Poems-of-the-Week

🖋 🏔 WONDERFUL WORDS: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

1 March 2023 by Bob O'Hara

“The river is moving. / The blackbird must be flying.” (Our playful homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Wallace Stevens, for the earliest migrants of spring.)

Filed Under: Homeschool Language & Literature, Poems-of-the-Week

🖋 🔭 WONDERFUL WORDS: Watchers of the Skies

22 February 2023 by Bob O'Hara

“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.)

Filed Under: Homeschool Language & Literature, Poems-of-the-Week

🖋 ☄️ WONDERFUL WORDS: The Truly Great

15 February 2023 by Bob O'Hara

“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.)

Filed Under: Homeschool Holidays & History, Homeschool Language & Literature, Poems-of-the-Week

🖋 ❤️ WONDERFUL WORDS: “Unwind the solemn twine, and tie my Valentine!”

8 February 2023 by Bob O'Hara

“Awake ye muses nine, sing me a strain divine!” (Our amatory homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Emily Dickinson, for Valentine Week.)

Filed Under: Homeschool Books & Libraries, Homeschool Holidays & History, Homeschool Language & Literature, Poems-of-the-Week

🖋 ❄️ WONDERFUL WORDS: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

1 February 2023 by Bob O'Hara

“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!)

Filed Under: Homeschool Language & Literature, Poems-of-the-Week

🖋 🌊 HOMESCHOOL HISTORY & LITERATURE: Remembering Challenger

22 January 2023 by Bob O'Hara

“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.)

Filed Under: Homeschool Astronomy, Homeschool Holidays & History, Homeschool Language & Literature, Poems-of-the-Week

🖋 🇺🇸 WONDERFUL WORDS (and Music!): Lift Every Voice and Sing

15 January 2023 by Bob O'Hara

“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 Martin Luther King’s birthday.)

Filed Under: Homeschool Arts & Music, Homeschool Holidays & History, Homeschool Language & Literature, Poems-of-the-Week

🖋 ⛸ WONDERFUL WORDS: A Winter Poem for Homeschool Dads

8 January 2023 by Bob O'Hara

“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.)

Filed Under: Homeschool Language & Literature, Poems-of-the-Week

🖋 ❄️ WONDERFUL WORDS: “What so soon will wake and grow”

1 January 2023 by Bob O'Hara

“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.)

Filed Under: Homeschool Language & Literature, Poems-of-the-Week

🖋 🔔 WONDERFUL WORDS (and Sounds!): Ring Out, Wild Bells!

31 December 2022 by Bob O'Hara

“Ring out the old, ring in the new, / Ring, happy bells, across the snow: / The year is going, let him go; / Ring out the false, ring in the true.” (Join Tennyson and some skillful bell-ringers to ring in the new year.)

Filed Under: Holiday Music Month, Homeschool Arts & Music, Homeschool Holidays & History, Homeschool Language & Literature, Poems-of-the-Week

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