Teacher Resources

If it's December, it's time for that familiar topic for reports: Christmas Customs Around the World. Fortunately, the library has a number of resources to help you.

On the last Thursday in July, the wild ponies on Virginia's Assateague Island will make their annual swim across to Chincoteague Island. Many of the foals will be auctioned off to raise money for the local fire department, just as they have since 1925. The custom of rounding up the ponies is much older, dating back to the 1700s at least, and it has always been held with a lot of celebration. Today, you and your family can visit Chincoteague during Pony Penning, enjoy a carnival and great seafood, and perhaps bring home your very own foal.

Twenty years before Jamestown was founded, over 100 women, men, and children came to Virginia to try their luck at starting a colony. They arrived on the stormy shores of what we know now as North Carolina. They were not the first to land there. Two years before, another group of colonists, all men, gave up trying to settle Roanoke Island and sailed back to England. The supply ships arrived too late to save the abandoned first colony, but they left behind fifteen soldiers to mind the fort who soon vanished into the wilds, driven off by an Indian attack.

That wascally wabbit was a smart guy. Carrots, along with other orange and green fruits and vegetables, are good for the eyes! They're packed with vitamin A. People who don't get enough of this vitamin can develop severe vision problems, but a rabbit or a person who gets plenty of vitamin A will know that she's doing all she can to make her vision healthy.

The long hot days of summer are coming, and with them there will be time for sports, time for camp, time to dream, and time to do. Time to start a diary or journal?

A journal can be written for only yourself, to write down the things that are important to you: lists of favorites (music, t.v., and movies), pictures of friends and family, and, of course, your innermost thoughts. Fun times deserve to be remembered, and sometimes writing about a bad situation can help you deal with it better as you think it through on paper. That kind of journal is personal, and you may not wish to share it with anyone.

What do the Earth, electric motors, and your computer all have in common?
These things are all influenced by magnets.

The Earth has a liquid metal core that acts like a bar magnet. It gets its magnetism from being near electrical currents beneath the surface. Because the Earth is not perfectly shaped, every so often the direction of the field will change. Scientists have found evidence that this has occurred at least 171 times over the past 71 million years. How do they know that? Magnets!

By Thomas Mathew

When Nathaniel Bacon rose against the colonial government in 1676, the royal governor and his burgesses realized they needed the Queen of Pamunkey's help to staunch the insurrection amongst their own people. A remarkable first-hand account survives from all those years ago. It details the Queen's emotional reaction to their demands.

This article was first printed in the May 1978 issue of the Fredericksburg Times magazine and appears here with the author's permission.

This American who is truly deserving of the terms "great" and "famous" was born January 14, 1806 in Spotsylvania County. He was the seventh child of Richard and Diana Minor Maury.

When we were expecting our first child, I started talking with my wife about homeschooling—which I now prefer to call unschooling. She agreed, and we have never regretted it. Raised to be independent learners, both children did well on their college entrance exams and are now away at college.

"In a poem, the secrets of the poem give it its tension and gift of emerging sense and form, so that it’s not always the flowering in the poem and the specific images that make it memorable, but the tensions and physicality, the rhythms, the underlying song.

The high spots of a poem could be said to correspond with the bloom in the garden. But you need the compositional entity in order to convey the weight and force of the poem’s motion, of its emerging meaning.