In 1961, famous American poet Robert Frost did something no other poet had ever done.
He read one of his poems for a presidential inauguration. John F. Kennedy personally asked Frost to read a poem for the inauguration, and Frost recited his famous poem “The Gift Outright.”
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Are you wearing green?
Saint Patrick, whom we celebrate March 17, is famous for teaching the ancient Irish about Christianity in the fifth century.
Legend has it that in order to teach people about the Holy Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), Patrick used a three-leaf shamrock to show how each leaf is separate but also part of the same plant.
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Everyone has stuff they don’t like doing or stuff that creeps them out.
That’s true for Howie Mandel, comedian and former host of the TV show Deal or No Deal. He hates shaking hands with people because of all the germs he can get from one handshake. Now he uses a fist bump.
“I do it because it just uses the outside of my hand. I can do it and still hold a sandwich. But when I get home,
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Some people believe they’re boring. They have no story to tell. They’ve done nothing interesting.
But a wise man named Ryter thinks they’re wrong.
In Rodman Philbrick’s The Last Book in the Universe, old man Ryter is talking to the young teen Spaz, the main character. Here’s what Ryter says to him:
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Japanese scientists are hot on the trail of the extinct wooly mammoth’s DNA, which is available from tissue preserved in Russia. What do they want to do with the DNA?
They want to clone it and, in about five years, make a modern mammoth.
Ryan Phelan of Revive & Restore would like to bring back
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I’ve had a long and strange relationship with the classics.
In 8th grade, our English class read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, but I could never figure out what the red “A” stood for.
As an Christian adult, I developed the inexplicable idea that reading fiction was a waste of time. I should read only religious or self-help books . . . until I became so ill that I was bored out of my skull for one month lying on the couch. Then I turned to the only fiction book in our tiny trailer: a complete collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, which seemed appropriate for someone with the last name of Watson.
I was hooked, and I never looked back.
(Well, there was that one time when I resisted reading George Eliot’s Silas Marner because I mistook “Marner” for “Mariner,” and I have a dislike for sea-going stories but then read it and it became one of my FAVORITES! But that is another story.)
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Do you have children or students who like to read but don’t have time?
How can you engender a love of reading in your home, even with reluctant readers?
Let’s create an atmosphere in our homes in which reading is not only possible but also enjoyable.
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Are your homeschool students completely and utterly bored with their writing lessons? Is it a struggle to get them to write again?
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When it comes to writing essays, it’s easy for students to stall out. They need motivation. They need a change. They need some fun—and so do we!
Here are three shocking writing tips you can use in your homeschool—shocking because they are fun and because, to your children, they are totally unexpected.
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In “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, four old friends who have wasted their lives are given water from the supposed Fountain of Youth. After they drink the water, the three men begin to fight over the woman, whom they all had fancied in their youth, and in their tussling, they knock over the vase with the precious water.
Dr. Heidegger learns his lesson. He is finished with trying to make people young again, but the three old folks come away from the experiment with a different idea. They want to travel to Florida to drink from the original Fountain of Youth. You can read the whole clever story here.
By the way, I’ve drunk from the Fountain of Youth in St. Augustine, Florida. The water tastes like it has sulfur in it (stinky-egg scent). And I can assure you that it has not worked.
Nathaniel Hawthorne never could have imagined a real company that freezes people to somehow revive them later. Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, freezes bodies in the hopes of
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Dr. Seuss’s real name is Theodor Seuss Geisel, and he’s the author of The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, Horton Hears a Who, and many other books.
A commemorative postage stamp, which you see here, was issued by the United States in 2004 on the anniversary of his 100th birthday.
And now, more than a quarter of a century after his death, Dr. Seuss was published again! The complete manuscript and sketches for What Pet Should I Get? was found in an old box and was published in 2015. It became a #1 New York Times Bestseller!
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