This Week · Responsibility
For littler ones: What's something at home that's your job to remember?
This week we're wondering about responsibility — the kind that's yours whether or not anyone's keeping track. What's a job that's yours to do even when no one would know if you skipped it? It's a good thing to turn over in the car or at the table, because the honest answer takes some thinking, and everyone at your house may land somewhere different.
This week's stories
American
On a small rock in Newport Harbor, Ida Lewis kept the lighthouse beam burning every single night and rowed out alone into cold, dark water after people in trouble — at least eighteen of them, over a life she could have left at any time and didn't.
American
A fast night-train engineer who, with a wreck seconds away and a carful of sleeping passengers behind him, told his fireman to jump but stayed at his post — slowing the train with one hand on the brake. The passengers lived; he didn't. The ballad that remembers him was made by a Black railroad worker who knew him, Wallace Saunders.
Classics
All summer the grasshopper fiddles while the ant hauls grain home, getting ready for a winter the grasshopper is sure won't come. Aesop's fable, told straight — when the snow falls, what each one did all summer is simply there.
Talk about it
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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