American
Martha's Winter Camp
Martha Washington left a warm Virginia house to spend the worst winters of the war in cold, hungry army camps beside her husband and his soldiers — and did it again every winter, for eight of them.
This Week · Keeping a Promise
Keeping a Promise: is a promise still a promise when it's costly?
For littler ones: If keeping your promise turns out to be really hard, do you still keep it?
This week we're wondering about keeping a promise — and not the easy kind, where you just show up. Is a promise still a promise when it costs you something hard? That's a good one to turn over in the car or at the table, because everyone at your house will weigh "hard" differently.
This week's stories
American
Casey Jones
A railroad engineer racing to make up lost time who stayed at his post and worked the brakes to the last second when the track ahead ran out, so the people behind him would be safe.
American
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
A grave for a soldier whose name no one ever learned, and the guards who walk a slow watch over it through every hour and every kind of weather, year after year, because someone promised it would never be left alone.
Talk about it
- Have you ever kept a promise when it turned out to be harder than you thought? What made you keep it — or what made it tempting to stop?
- Martha could have stayed home warm, and the guards could go inside when it storms. Why do you think they don't?
- Is there a difference between a promise you say out loud and one nobody ever made you say?
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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