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This Week · Hope · MLK

Hope: when things are hard, what gives you hope?

For littler ones: When something feels really hard, what makes you feel like it's going to be okay?

Hope — When things are hard, what gives you hope?

This week we're wondering about hope — the kind you hold onto when the road is long and the night feels like it won't end. When things are hard, what gives you hope? Maybe a person, maybe one small idea you won't let go of. It's a good thing to turn over in the car or at the table, the week the country marks Dr. King's birthday — the man who led Black Americans' fight against segregation and kept going through years when the outcome was far from certain — because everyone at your house will answer it differently.

This week's stories

Classics

Sleeping Beauty

A whole kingdom falls under a sleep that lasts a hundred years, while a wall of thorns grows up around it — and still, someone believes the day will come when it wakes.

American

Sarah Hale's Seventeen Letters

A woman with a steady pen wrote letter after letter for seventeen years, to one president after another, asking for a national day of Thanksgiving.

American

The Eleventh Hour

After four long years of war, the guns finally go quiet at the eleventh hour, and a young soldier far from home hears a single bird sing in the silence.

Talk about it

  • When something feels really hard, what's a thing that helps you keep going?
  • Sarah Hale wrote letters for seventeen years before anyone said yes. What do you think kept her writing?
  • Is hope something you feel, or something you do — or both?

A new question every week.

Listen together in the app — short audio stories for kids 4–10, at bedtime, on the drive, in the drop-off line.

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