“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.)
🖋 Homeschool Poems-of-the-Week (Recent Posts)
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 (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.)
🖋 ⛸ 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: “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 homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Philip Larkin, for all things born in January.)
🖋 🔔 WONDERFUL WORDS (and Sounds!): Ring Out, Wild Bells!
“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.)
🖋 🍻 WONDERFUL WORDS (and Music!): Auld Lang Syne
“We two once ran along the hills and picked the daisies fine; / But we’ve wandered many a weary foot since those days of long ago.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Robert Burns, for auld lang syne.)
🖋 🎅 WONDERFUL WORDS: ’Twas the Night Before Christmas
“The children were nestled all snug in their beds; / While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Clement Clarke Moore, for Christmas Eve of course!)
🖋 🍂 WONDERFUL WORDS: The End of a Season
“The leaves are all dead on the ground, / Save those that the oak is keeping / To ravel them one by one / And let them go scraping and creeping / Out over the crusted snow, / When others are sleeping.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Robert Frost, for the end of fall.)
🖋 📖 WONDERFUL WORDS: Happy Birthday to Emily Dickinson!
“He ate and drank the precious Words — / His Spirit grew robust.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Emily Dickinson, for her birthday.)
🖋 🗡 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!)
🖋 🌠 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.)
🖋 🌅 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.)
🖋 🍃 WONDERFUL WORDS: “Our Summer made her light escape”
“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: 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
“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.)