“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 the Martin Luther King holiday.)
🖋 Homeschool Poetry: Literary Lessons for the Whole Year
You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.
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 parents as well! Print your own copy of our River Houses Poetry Calendar on our main homeschool calendar page, and subscribe to our free homeschool newsletter to get more great teaching tips delivered right to your mailbox every week. 📫
🖋 ⛸ 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 paternal 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 hopeful 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 in your homeschool.)
🖋 🍻 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 celebratory 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 festive 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 pensive 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 literary homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Emily Dickinson, for her upcoming 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 peaceful 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 delicious 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 sublunary 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 commemorative homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Laurence Binyon, for Veterans Day and Armistice Day.)
🖋 🇺🇸 WONDERFUL WORDS: America’s Choosing Day
“These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships.” (Our electoral homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Walt Whitman, for the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.)
🖋 🌅 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 reassuring 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 dreamy 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.” (An extra pomological homeschool 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 imperial 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 bountiful 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 wistful 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 encouraging 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 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!”
“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
“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.)