![[The River Houses]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/arms-icon-100x100.png "The River Houses"){kind=icon}
![[Battle of Marathon]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/battle-of-marathon-stamp-2010-150x107.jpg)
The Battle of Marathon, fought on the eastern coast of mainland Greece in 490 B.C., was one of the most consequential battles in the history of the Western world. It’s an event every homeschool student should know.
📖 Homeschool Language & Literature: Easy Lessons for the Whole Year
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. Subscribe to our free homeschool newsletter 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: 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 transitional homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Elizabeth Jennings, for the coming fall.)
🖋 🏡 “A HANDSOME HOUSE to lodge a friend” (For the New Homeschool Year)
“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 (To Close the Homeschool Year)
“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 farewell poem-of-the-week, from Robert Louis Stevenson, for the end of the River Houses homeschool year.)
🖋 🌞 WONDERFUL WORDS: “Poor, middle-agèd summer!”
![[Goldenrod Stamp 2017]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/goldenrod-monarch-2017-stamp-150x96.jpg)
“Whole fields of golden-rod cannot offset / One meadow with a single violet.” (Our vainglorious 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 clever 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 celebratory 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
![[Kingfisher]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/kingfisher-stamp-2014-estonia-150x150.jpg)
“Like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s / Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name.” (Our intricate homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Gerard Manley Hopkins, for his birthday and for the halcyon days of summer.)
🖋 🐝 WONDERFUL WORDS: “Answer, July”
![[Emily Dickinson]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/dickinson-stamp-1971-96x150.jpg)
“Where is the Bee — / Where is the Blush — / Where is the Hay?” (Our playful homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Emily Dickinson, for July.)
📖 🖋 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 hopeful homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Phillis Wheatley, for independent America.)
🇺🇸 🥂 HOMESCHOOL TOASTING TRADITIONS the Whole Year Round
Why not begin the delightful tradition of offering a toast around your family table each week. This classic Independence Day toast is a perfect way to get started.
🖋 🇺🇸 WONDERFUL WORDS: William Emerson on “A Nation’s Strength”
![[Constitution Stamp 1987]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/we-the-people-stamp-1987-150x82.jpg)
“Not gold but only men can make / A people great and strong.” (Our patriotic homeschool poem-of-the-week, from William Ralph Emerson, for Independence Day.)
🖋 🚂 WONDERFUL WORDS: “It was late June”
![[Blackbird Stamp 1966]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/blackbird-stamp-uk-1966-150x90.jpg)
“And for that minute a blackbird sang / Close by, and round him, mistier, / Farther and farther, all the birds / Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.” (Our timely homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Edward Thomas, for late June and the birds of summer.)
🖋 🏰 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 paternal homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, for Father’s Day, the third Sunday in June.)
🖋 🇺🇸 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 American homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Francis Scott Key, for Flag Day, the 14th of June.)
📚 LEARNING THE LIBRARY: The Literary 800s
![[Dewey Decimal Classes]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/dewey-decimal-classes-2-150x90.jpg)
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: Happy Birthday to Walt Whitman
“Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich, / Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love, / A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother, / Chair’d in the adamant of Time.” (Happy birthday to the great Poet of America, Walt Whitman, born on this day in 1819.)
🎓 🎉 HOMESCHOOL MUSIC & HISTORY: Let Us Rejoice!
Invite your homeschoolers to learn a few lines this week from the most famous of all medieval student songs – it’s an educational inheritance they can carry with them all around the world.
🇺🇸 “AFTER A HUNDRED YEARS / Nobody knows the Place”
“Weeds triumphant ranged / Strangers strolled and spelled / At the lone Orthography / Of the Elder Dead.” (A special peaceful homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Emily Dickinson, for Memorial Day.)
🎂 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. Emerson is wonderful summer reading for homeschoolers.
🇺🇸 🕊 HOMESCHOOL HISTORY: Memorial Day
![[US Flag Stamp 2019]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/us-flag-stamp-2019-150x132.jpg)
“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.)
🖋 🎓 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 promising late May poem-of-the-week, from Marta Keen, for homeschool graduation season and the coming summer.)
🖋 🌟 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 astronomical homeschool poem-of-the-week, from William Cullen Bryant, for Polaris, our Great Star for the month of May.)
🖋 🍃 WONDERFUL WORDS: Robert Frost’s “Birches”
“One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.” (Our youthful homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Robert Frost, for springtime 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, the second Sunday in May.)
