The River Houses

A National Network of Local Homeschool Societies

🏡 WELCOME! (Pinned Post)

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First time visitor? We post a wide range of easy-to-use educational ideas and “little lessons” that will enrich your homeschooling schedule all through the year. Please add your name to our free mailing list! (Just one message a week and no spam.) 😊

There’s a wealth of wonderful material here on our website — everything from homeschool astronomy to books and libraries to language and literature to geography, natural history, homeschool calendars, and more. The materials we’re developing are going to become the foundation for a new type of homeschool network made up of friendly local groups called “Houses” (just like in Harry Potter). Make yourself at home! 😊

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🇺🇸 MEMORIAL DAY 2022

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Monday is Memorial Day in the United States, the day we remember the nation’s war dead. Why not let some undergraduates from one of the most selective colleges in the country — the United States Military Academy at West Point — assist you and your students in your remembrance this weekend (with words and music from Randall Wallace and Nick Glennie-Smith):

For homeschoolers, everything is an opportunity for learning: holidays, history, songs, singers, and place names. Can your students find West Point, New York, on a map and explain its significance?

Although “West Point” is now shorthand for our national military academy, the name West Point in its original sense refers to the high point of land that projects into the Hudson River just a few miles north (upstream) from New York City. The point forces the Hudson to make a sharp bend, and artillery placed there can easily control all traffic on the river. West Point was first fortified during the American Revolution and it has been occupied by the United States Army ever since. The Hudson River–Lake Champlain–Richelieu River corridor between New York City and Montreal (on the St. Lawrence River) was one of the most contested military and commercial transportation routes on the North American continent for almost 200 years. Plate 44 in your River Houses atlas will show you the location of West Point and let your students get a sense of its geographical importance.

You can also remind your students this weekend that what we now call Memorial Day was originally called Decoration Day after the custom of decorating the graves of soldiers who had fought in the Civil War. The name has changed, but the honorable custom continues, as you’ll see if you visit almost any cemetery across the country in the next few days.

[Decoration Day at Arlington National Cemetery]
Grave of General Frank. M. Andrews (1884–1943), United States Army Air Corps, Arlington National Cemetery. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1882 poem “Decoration Day” shows us why Longfellow was the most popular poet of nineteenth-century America. Why not share it with your homeschool students also on this Decoration Day weekend.

Decoration Day

Sleep, comrades, sleep and rest
On this field of the Grounded Arms,
Where foes no more molest,
Nor sentry’s shot alarms!

Ye have slept on the ground before,
And started to your feet
At the cannon’s sudden roar,
Or the drum’s redoubling beat.

But in this camp of Death
No sound your slumber breaks;
Here is no fevered breath,
No wound that bleeds and aches.

All is repose and peace,
Untrampled lies the sod;
The shouts of battle cease,
It is the Truce of God!

Rest, comrades, rest and sleep!
The thoughts of men shall be
As sentinels to keep
Your rest from danger free.

Your silent tents of green
We deck with fragrant flowers
Yours has the suffering been,
The memory shall be ours.

Longfellow’s “Decoration Day” is a fine example that you can use to teach about extended metaphors in literature. The poem draws an imaginative comparison between soldiers sleeping on their battlefield campgrounds at night, and the rows of graves in the burial ground covered by “tents” of green grass. See how many specific contrasts and comparisons your students can identify (the contrast between the trampled ground of the battlefield and the untrampled ground of the burying field; the comparison between the sentinel guards on the battlefield and all of us as guardians of memory on the burying field; and so on).

What other educational and historical anniversaries have you studied in your homeschool this Leo Term?

❡ Explore more: You can find a host of additional Memorial Day teaching resources on the Library of Congress page “Remembering Our Honored Dead: A Memorial Day Round Up.” 📚

❡ Here, said the year: This is one of our occasional posts on Homeschool Holidays & Anniversaries. Print your own copy of our River Houses calendar of educational events to follow along with us, and add your name to our weekly mailing list to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🗞

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🦅 FRIDAY BIRD FAMILIES: Indigobirds, Old World Sparrows, and Allies

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Every Friday we invite you and your homeschool students to learn about a different group of North American birds in your recommended bird guide. It’s a great way to add a few minutes of informal science, geography, natural history, and imagination to your homeschool schedule throughout the year.

This week’s birds (four different families) are the Indigobirds and Whydahs (pages 426–427), the Weavers (pages 426–427), the Estrildid Finches (pages 428–429), and the Old World Sparrows (pages 428–429). That may sound like a lot, but in fact none of these families are native to North America: all are represented here by introduced or escaped species only, and only one species from these four groups has spread widely and become naturalized across the continent.

If you’re teaching younger children, the way to use these posts is just to treat your bird guide as a picture book and spend a few minutes each week looking at all the interesting birds they may see one day. With that, your little lesson is done.

If you have older students, one of your objectives should be to help them become fluent with a technical reference book that’s packed with information, the kind of book they will encounter in many different fields of study. Here’s how your bird guide introduces this week’s birds:

INDIGOBIRDS · WHYDAHS — Family Viduidae. Native to Africa, these species (two genera) are all obligate brood parasites. Pin-tailed Whydah not accepted by ABA. [That is, the American Birding Association doesn’t consider this species sufficiently established to “count” as a North American bird.] Species: 20 World, 1 N.A.

WEAVERS — Family Ploceidae. Large, primarily African family. Breeding males are often highly colored. Build elaborate woven nests. Northern Red Bishop not accepted by ABA. Species: 108 World, 1 N.A.

ESTRILDID FINCHES — Family Estrildidae. Large Old World family found from Africa to Australia and South Pacific Islands. Most are small with pointed tails. Related to weavers. Species: 140 World, 1 N.A.

OLD WORLD SPARROWS — Family Passeridae. Old World family. Gregarious; two species have become established in N.A. Species: 39 World, 2 N.A.

When you’re training your young naturalists, teach them to ask and answer from their bird guide some of the first questions any naturalist would ask about a new group — about the Old World Sparrows, for example. How many species? (39 worldwide.) Are there any near us? (Only two species in North America, both of them introduced from Europe; the individual maps will give us more detail.) What are their distinctive features? (Old World group [i.e., native to Europe, Africa, and Asia, not North or South America], gregarious, and so on.) (And “gregarious” is certainly a wonderful word, isn’t it — be sure to send someone to your homeschool dictionary to look that one up.) 🔎

Pick a representative species or two to look at in detail each week and read the entry aloud, or have your students study it and then narrate it back to you, explaining all the information it contains. This week, for the Old World Sparrow family, why not investigate the familiar House Sparrow (page 428), one of the most common birds in North America and a species every homeschool naturalist should know. (I can hear half a dozen chattering outside my window as I’m typing this.)

All sorts of biological information is packed into the brief species descriptions in your bird guide — can your students tease it out? How big is the House Sparrow? (6¼ inches long.) What is its scientific name? (Passer domesticus.) Will you be able to find this species where you live? At what times of year and in what habitat? (Study the range map and range description carefully to answer those questions, and see the book’s back flap for a map key.) Do the males and females look alike? The adults and juveniles? What song or call does this species make? How can you distinguish it from similar species? (The text and illustrations should answer all these questions.)

House Sparrows are common across North America, mainly in habitats that humans also frequent. (About the only place you never find them is in forests.) They will just as happily nest in the eaves of an urban apartment building as in a rural horse barn. If you had explored the United States at the time of the Civil War or earlier, however, you wouldn’t have found a single one: they were introduced in the late 1800s from Europe and by the mid twentieth century they had spread from coast to coast.

House Sparrows exhibit clear sexual dimorphism: in the breeding season the males sport a black throat and breast, gray cap, and chestnut markings on the head, while the females are generally a plainer beige. (The two photos above represent a breeding-plumage male and female.) In the non-breeding season the sexes are still readily distinguishable, although the males are not quite as boldly patterned as they are in spring and summer and look a bit more like the females.

As a second species this week, for fun, why not look at the Pin-tailed Whydah (page 426) in the Indigobird and Whydah family. You’re not likely to see one unless you live near Los Angeles, where they have escaped from captivity and become naturalized in the wild — they are native to Africa and not really a North American species. But that could have been said a century ago about the House Sparrow and they now cover the continent, so who knows….

As your bird guide notes, all members of the Whydah family are brood parasites. They build no nests of their own, and the females spend the breeding season skulking about and locating other birds’ nests, and then dropping their own eggs into them when no one is looking. The Brown-headed Cowbird (page 538) is the only native North American bird that is also a brood parasite.

You can do little ten-minute lessons of this kind with any of the species in your bird guide that catch your interest. Pick one that lives near you, or that looks striking, or that has a strange name, and explore.

In all these Friday Bird Families posts, our aim is not to present a specific set of facts to memorize. We hope instead to provide examples and starting points that you and your students can branch away from in many different directions. We also hope to show how you can help your students develop the kind of careful skills in reading, observation, and interpretation that they will need in all their future academic work.

What ornithological observations and naturalistical notes did you make in your homeschool this Leo Term? 😊

❡ Homeschool birds: We think bird study is one of the best subjects you can take up in a homeschool environment. It’s suitable for all ages, it can be made as elementary or as advanced as you wish, it can be made solitary or social, and birds can be found just about anywhere at any season of the year. Why not track your own homeschool bird observations using the free eBird website sponsored by Cornell University. It’s a great way to learn more about what’s in your local area and about how bird populations change from season to season. 🐦

❡ Vade mecum: The front matter in your bird guide (pages 6–13) explains a little bit about basic bird biology and about some of the technical terminology used throughout the book — why not have your students study it as a special project. Have them note particularly the diagrams showing the parts of a bird (pages 10–11) so they’ll be able to tell primaries from secondaries and flanks from lores. 🦉

❡ Words for birds: You may not think of your homeschool dictionary as a nature reference, but a comprehensive dictionary will define and explain many of the standard scientific terms you will encounter in biology and natural history, although it will not generally contain the proper names of species or other taxonomic groups that aren’t part of ordinary English. (In other words, you’ll find “flamingo” but not Phoenicopterus, the flamingo genus.) One of the most important things students should be taught to look for in the dictionary is the information on word origins: knowing the roots of scientific terms makes it much easier to understand them and remember their meaning. 📖

❡ Come, here’s the map: Natural history and geography are deeply interconnected. One of the first questions you should teach your students to ask about any kind of animal or plant is, “What is its range? Where (in the world) does it occur?” Our recommended homeschool reference library includes an excellent world atlas that will help your students appreciate many aspects of biogeography, the science of the geographical distribution of living things. 🌎

❡ Nature notes: This is one of our regular Friday Bird Families posts for homeschool naturalists. Print your own copy of our River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow along with us! You can also add your name to our free weekly mailing list to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🐦 🦉 🦆 🦃 🦅

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🎂 HOMESCHOOL HOLIDAYS: Happy Birthday, Ralph! (Emerson, that is)

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Today is the birthday of the great American essayist, poet, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), a name every American homeschool student should know. And although we called him Ralph in the headline above, his family and friends knew him as Waldo.

In our modern age of television, movies, and the Internet, it’s hard for us to imagine what a “celebrity” might have looked like in the nineteenth century. But if anyone was a celebrity in nineteenth-century America, it was Emerson. His essays and books were best sellers, his aphorisms were the talk of every literary circle, and over the course of his long life he delivered more than a thousand public lectures to packed houses all across the country. And for many readers outside of the United States, Emerson was the voice of America.

Our River Houses mascot Horace the Otter is a big Ralph Waldo Emerson fan, and he hopes you and your students are too.

Horace the Otter pays a call on his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Emerson is a great writer for teens. You can find copies of his essays and poems in any public library, and inexpensive editions are available in every bookstore. (The Portable Emerson is a good modern anthology to add to your permanent teaching collection.) Like Benjamin Franklin, Emerson had a talent for crafting the just-right phrase, and like Franklin, he’s quoted everywhere. (“Hitch your wagon to a star.”)

This week for Emerson’s birthday, why not send your students off to read his famous essay “Self-Reliance,” a work that has inspired young Americans for close to two hundred years. Start them there, and see where their star-hitched wagons go. 🌟

What educational anniversaries have you been celebrating in your homeschool this Leo Term? 😊

❡ Here, said the year: This is one of our occasional posts on Homeschool Holidays & Anniversaries. Print your own copy of our River Houses calendar of educational events to follow along with us, and add your name to our weekly mailing list to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🗞

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🌍 🇸🇦 WEEKLY WORLD HERITAGE: The Al-Hijr Site in Saudi Arabia

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Saudi Arabia in the Middle East is one of our homeschool countries-of-the-week, so why not spend a few minutes today learning about one of Saudi Arabia’s World Heritage Sites: the Al-Hijr (Hegra) Archaeological Site.

Ancient Nabatean architecture cut into the sandstone cliffs at the Al-Hijr Archaeological Site. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

The al-Hijr Archaeological Site, also known as Hegra and Mada’in Salih, includes historic structures and remains from a number of ancient civilizations that occupied the Arabian Peninsula:

The archaeological site of Al-Hijr is a major site of the Nabataean civilisation, in the south of its zone of influence. Its integrity is remarkable and it is well conserved. It includes a major ensemble of tombs and monuments, whose architecture and decorations are directly cut into the sandstone.

It bears witness to the encounter between a variety of decorative and architectural influences (Assyrian, Egyptian, Phoenician, Hellenistic), and the epigraphic presence of several ancient languages (Lihyanite, Thamudic, Nabataean, Greek, Latin). It bears witness to the development of Nabataean agricultural techniques using a large number of artificial wells in rocky ground. The wells are still in use. [It was also a site of] the international caravan trade during late Antiquity. (World Heritage Centre #1293)

You can find a gallery of additional photos of the Al-Hijr Archaeological Site on the World Heritage Centre’s website.

Ancient Roman inscription at Al-Hijr dedicated to Emperor Marcus Aurelius. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

World Heritage Sites are cultural or natural landmarks of international significance, selected for recognition by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. More than 1000 such sites have been recognized in over 160 countries, and we feature one every Wednesday, drawn from one of our homeschool countries-of-the-week. You can find a complete list of World Heritage Sites online at the World Heritage Centre and in Wikipedia.

The World Heritage Centre also has a free and comprehensive World Heritage education kit for teachers, as well as a wonderful full-color wall map of World Heritage Sites, available for the cost of shipping. Why not add them both to your own homeschool library. 🗺

What world treasures have you explored in your homeschool this Leo Term? 😊

❡ Books in the running brooks: You can always turn to your River Houses almanac, atlas, and history encyclopedia for more information about any of our countries-of-the-week. The almanac has profiles of all the nations of the world on pages 752–859; the endpapers of the atlas are indexes that will show you where all of the individual national and regional maps may be found; the history encyclopedia includes national histories on pages 489–599; and you can find additional illustrations, flags, and other mentions through the indexes in each of these volumes. For an ideal little lesson, just write the name of the Weekly World Heritage Site on your homeschool bulletin board, find its location in your atlas, read the WHC’s brief description aloud, look at a picture or two, and you’re done. Over the course of the year, without even realizing it, your students will absorb a wealth of new historical, geographical, and cultural information. 🇸🇦

❡ The great globe itself: This is one of our regular Homeschool States & Countries posts featuring historical and natural sites of international importance. Download a copy of our River Houses World Heritage Calendar and follow along with us as we tour the planet, and add your name to our weekly mailing list to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🌎 🌍 🌏

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🖋 🎓 GRADUATION SEASON: “Set me free to find my calling”

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The end of May marks the end of the Leo Term, our spring term in the River Houses, and many homeschoolers treat the end of May as an opportunity to hold a family graduation ceremony. The beautiful song “Homeward Bound” by American composer Marta Keen (b. 1953) has in recent years become a staple of high school choirs around the country and of many other vocal groups as well. The narrator in the song is a young person asking permission to leave home, and promising to return. We think “Homeward Bound” is an ideal spring-time graduation anthem for every home academy. The words are our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the last week of May:

Homeward Bound

In the quiet misty morning, when the moon has gone to bed,
When the sparrows stop their singing and the sky is clear and red,
When the summer’s ceased its gleaming, when the corn is past its prime,
When adventure’s lost its meaning, I’ll be homeward bound in time.

Bind me not to the pasture, chain me not to the plow,
Set me free to find my calling and I’ll return to you somehow.

If you find it’s me you’re missing, if you’re hoping I’ll return,
To your thoughts I’ll soon be list’ning; in the road I’ll stop and turn,
Then the wind will set me racing as my journey nears its end,
And the path I’ll be retracing when I’m homeward bound again.

Bind me not to the pasture, chain me not to the plow,
Set me free to find my calling and I’ll return to you somehow.

In the quiet misty morning when the moon has gone to bed,
When the sparrows stop their singing, I’ll be homeward bound again.

Here’s a fine video performance by the Brigham Young University student ensemble Vocal Point, accompanied by the All-American Boys Chorus:

Or perhaps instead of an all-male performance, you’d prefer the all-female Ballard High School Treble Choir from Seattle:

Or, if you’d like a more Classical rendition, try this resonant recording from the great Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, produced by Deutsche Grammophon:

Or maybe best of all — and an inspiration for any young singers you may have in your home academy — here’s a delightful performance by the Texas Children’s Choir in San Antonio:

Happy graduation season to all homeschoolers everywhere!

What other wonderful words and marvelous music did you discover in your homeschool this Leo Term? 😊

❡ I’ll be homeward bound in time: If a special line or turn of phrase happens to strike you in one of our weekly poems, just copy it onto your homeschool bulletin board for a few days and invite your students to speak it aloud — that’s all it takes to begin a new poetical friendship and learn a few lovely words that will stay with you for life. 🎓

❡ Here, said the year: This post is one of our regular homeschool poems-of-the-week. Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar to follow along with us as we visit fifty of our favorite friends over the course of the year, and add your name to our River Houses mailing list to get posts like these delivered right to your mailbox every week. 🗞

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🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 22 May 2022

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Quick Freshes are our regular Sunday notes on the homeschool week ahead. Pick one or two (or more!) of the items below each week and use them to enrich your homeschooling schedule. Add your name to our free mailing list to get posts like these delivered right to your mailbox each week. Visit our River Houses calendar page to print your own homeschool calendars and planners for the entire year.

🗓 🦁 This is the last full week of LEO TERM, our spring term in the River Houses. Hercules Term, our summer term, begins on Wednesday the first of June.

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Colorado, and our COUNTRIES are Samoa 🇼🇸, San Marino 🇸🇲, São Tomé and Príncipe 🇸🇹, and Saudi Arabia 🇸🇦. (Our separate Sunday States & Countries post for the week went up just a few minutes ago.)

🌗 THE MOON at the beginning of this week is at its third quarter — a good time for moon watching! You can explore the night sky and the features of the moon in your recommended backyard astronomy guide and your homeschool world atlas, and you can learn a host of stellar and lunar facts on pages 331–346 in your almanac. Browse through our many homeschool astronomy posts for even more.

🗓 TODAY, Sunday (22 May 2022) — Today is the 142nd day of 2022; there are 223 days remaining in this common year. Learn more about different modern and historical calendars on pages 347–353 in your River Houses almanac. 📚 Today is the birthday of the famous American impressionist painter Mary Cassatt (1844–1926).‍🎨 It’s also the birthday of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930), the inventor of the inimitable Sherlock Holmes. 🕵️ And our homeschool poem (and song!) of the week for the last week of May is Marta Keen’s “Homeward Bound,” a modern classic for school graduations around the world. Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us throughout the year. 🎓

Monday (23 May 2022) — Today is the birthday of the great Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), who devised the system of species nomenclature that is still in use today in the biological sciences by all of us members of Homo sapiens. 🐟 🐢 🐳 🐒 🐝 🐪 🐞 🐌 🦋 🦉

Tuesday (24 May 2022) — Today is the birthday of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom (1819–1901), who gave her name to an entire historical era. You can read more about Victoria and the Victorians on page 348 in your homeschool history encyclopedia. 👑 And on this day in 1844, Samuel F.B. Morse sent the message “What hath God wrought!” from the U.S. Capitol building to his assistant in Baltimore, thirty-five miles away, instantly, thereby inaugurating the first commercial telegraph line between two U.S. cities. ⚡️

Wednesday (25 May 2022) — It’s World Otter Day! Our mascot Horace the Otter approves! 🦦 Today is the birthday of the great American poet, essayist, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). 🖋 And on this day in 1977, the first Star Wars movie was released! 🚀 Our Wednesday tour of World Heritage Sites this week will take you to the Al-Hijr Archaeological Site in Saudi Arabia. 🇸🇦

Thursday (26 May 2022) — It’s National Paper Airplane Day! ✈️

Friday (27 May 2022) — Today is the birthday of the American poet and songwriter Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910), author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (“Mine eyes have seen the glory”). 🌅 🍇 🎺 ⚡️ ⚔️ Our Friday Bird Families post this week will introduce you to the Indigobirds, Whydahs, Weavers, Estrildid Finches, and Old World Sparrows. Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦅

Saturday (28 May 2022) — A solar eclipse occurred on this day in the year 585 B.C. during the Battle of the Halys River in central Anatolia, leading to a truce. The exact date of that eclipse is one of the key reference points from which other dates in ancient Near Eastern history are calculated. 🌏 🌑 🌞

Sunday (29 May 2022) — On this day in 1453, the city of Constantinople fell to the Ottoman armies of Sultan Mehmed II after a 53-day siege, bringing to an end the ancient Byzantine Empire that had survived for more than a thousand years. You can explore more on pages 198, 206, and 246 in your homeschool history encyclopedia ⚔️ And speaking of eclipses, another solar eclipse, occurring on this day in 1919, allowed Sir Arthur Eddington to confirm Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. 🌏 🌑 🌞 On this day in 1953, mountaineers Edmund Hillary and Tenzig Norgay became the first climbers ever to reach the summit of Mount Everest. 🏔 And our Sunday States & Countries for next week will be North Dakota 🇺🇸, Senegal 🇸🇳, Serbia 🇷🇸, Seychelles 🇸🇨, and Sierra Leone 🇸🇱.

🥂 🍽 OUR WEEKLY TOAST, for the coming summer: “May our wants be supplied, and our virtuous wishes satisfied.”

❡ Toasts can be a fun educational tradition for your family table. We offer one each week — you can take it up, or make up one of your own (“To North American dinosaurs!”), or invite a different person to come up with one for each meal (“To unpredictability in toasting!”). Many of our current toasts are taken from an old anthology called The Royal Toast Master, Containing Many Thousands of the Best Toasts Old and New (London, 1793). What will you toast in your homeschool this week? 🥂

🌍 🇸🇦 EVERYTHING FLOWS: Saudi Arabia in the Middle East is one of our countries of the week, but as a desert nation it has no permanent rivers. It does have many wadis, however — intermittent streams that fill with water during rainy periods, similar to washes in the American southwest. Our Weekly World River is therefore Wadi Hanifa, which flows through the Saudi capital of Riyadh. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Wadi Hanifa entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

Wadi Hanifa in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

❡ Children of Ocean: Why not do a homeschool study of world rivers over the course of the year? Take the one we select each week (above), or start with the river lists in your almanac (pages 693–695), and make it a project to look them all up in your atlas, or in a handy encyclopedia either online or on a weekly visit to your local library. A whole world of geographical learning awaits you. 🌎 🌍 🌏

What do you have planned for your homeschool this week? 😊

❡ Lively springs: This is one of our regular “Quick Freshes” posts looking at the homeschool week ahead. Add your name to our River Houses mailing list and get these weekly messages delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. You can also print your own River Houses calendars of educational events and follow along with us. 🗓

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🌎 🇺🇸 SUNDAY STATES: Colorado, Samoa, Saudi Arabia, and More

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Tour the United States and travel the countries of the world each week with the River Houses. Our Sunday States & Countries posts will point the way.

Many homeschoolers like to review the U.S. states and the nations of the world each year, and our recommended homeschool reference library includes a current world almanac, a world atlas, and a history encyclopedia that make these reviews fun and easy. Our own annual review begins at the start of the River Houses year in September and goes through the states in the traditional order of admission to the Union (almanac page 418), so this week’s state is:

  • 🇺🇸
    Colorado State Seal
    COLORADO (the 38th state, 1 August 1876) — The Centennial State. Capital: Denver. Colorado can be found on page 566 in your almanac and on plates 38 and 142 in your atlas (10th and 11th eds.). Name origin: “From Spanish for ‘red,’ first applied to Colorado River” (almanac page 419). State bird: Lark Bunting (bird guide page 498). Website: www.colorado.gov.

❡ Little lessons: You can teach a hundred little lessons with our state-of-the-week posts, using your reference library as a starting point. Find the location of the state capital in your atlas each week. Look up the state bird in your bird guide. Read the almanac’s one-paragraph history aloud each week. Using each state’s official website (above), find and copy the preamble to that state’s constitution into a commonplace book over the course of the year. Practice math skills by graphing each state’s population and area. Look up the famous state residents listed in your almanac either online or at your local library. The possibilities are endless and they can be easily adapted to each student’s age and interests. Pick a simple pattern to follow for just a few minutes each week and your little lesson is done. By the end of the year, without even realizing it, your students will have absorbed a wealth of new geographical and historical information, as well as a host of valuable reading and research skills. 🔍

❡ Maps to color: National Geographic has a large blank United States map and a blank world map, complete with flags, printable in sections and ready to receive the colored pencils of your students. Why not give them a try this week. 🖍

We go through the countries of the world in alphabetical order, so this week’s countries, with their official websites, are:

  • 🇼🇸 SAMOA in the southern Pacific Ocean. Population: 204,898. Capital: Apia. Government: Parliamentary republic. Website: www.samoagovt.ws (in English).
  • 🇸🇲 SAN MARINO in southern Europe, surrounded by Italy. Population: 34,467. Capital: San Marino. Government: Parliamentary republic. Website: www.gov.sm (in Italian).
  • 🇸🇹 SÃO TOMÉ AND PRÍNCIPE off the west coast of Africa. Population: 213,948. Capital: São Tomé. Government: Semi-presidential republic. Website: presidencia.st (in Portuguese).
  • 🇸🇦 SAUDI ARABIA in the Middle East. Population: 34,783,757. Capital: Riyadh. Government: Absolute monarchy. Website: www.saudi.gov.sa (in English and Arabic).

These all appear in your current almanac, atlas, and history encyclopedia as well. The almanac, for example, has profiles of the nations of the world on pages 745–852; the endpapers of the atlas are index maps that will show you where each of the individual national and regional maps can be found; the history encyclopedia includes individual national histories on pages 489–599; and you can find additional illustrations, flags, and other mentions through the indexes in each of these volumes.

What grand global geographical excursions (real or virtual) have you made in your homeschool this Leo Term? 😊

❡ Read and think critically: The country links above go to official websites, which are not always in English and which may well be propagandistic in one way or another, thus offering older students a good opportunity to exercise their critical reading and thinking skills. 🔍

❡ Come, here’s the map: Teaching your students to be fluent with high-quality maps — not just basically competent, but fluent — is one of the best educational gifts you can give them. Why not look up any one of our selected states or countries each week in your recommended homeschool atlas and show your students how to locate rivers, lakes, marshes, water depths, mountains and their elevations, highway numbers, airports, oil fields, railroads, ruins, battle sites, small towns, big cities, regional capitals, national capitals, parks, deserts, glaciers, borders, grid references, lines of longitude and latitude, and much more. There is so much information packed into professional maps of this kind that a magnifying glass is always helpful, even for young folks with good eyesight. The endpapers of the atlas and the technical map-reading information on Plate 2 (10th and 11th eds.) will guide you in your voyages of discovery. 🗺

❡ Plan an imaginary vacation: Here’s a fun exercise for your students: take one of the countries that we list each week and write out a family travel plan. How would you get there? How much will it cost? Will you need a passport? Where will you stay? Will you have to exchange your currency? How do you say hello the local language? What cities and attractions and landmarks will you visit? What foods will you eat? How will you get around (car, train, boat, mule)? Make a simple worksheet with blank spaces for the answers, have your students do the research, and start planning your world tour. ✈️ 🚞 🚗 🛳 🐎 😊

❡ The great globe itself: This is one of our regular Sunday States & Countries posts. Print your own River Houses States & Countries Calendar and follow along with us as we take an educational tour of the United States and the whole world over the course of the homeschool year. And don’t forget to add your name to our free mailing list to get more great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox every week. 🇺🇸 🌎

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📏 ⏱ 🌡 HAPPY WORLD METROLOGY DAY 2022!

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It’s World Metrology Day! On this day in 1875, the meter was adopted as the standard for the metric system of measurement, and the rest is history. 📏

Poster for World Metrology Day 2022. (Available from worldmetrologyday.org.)

Metrology is the science of measurement, and it serves as a foundation for all other branches of science (not to mention commerce, industry, and daily life). Can your students recognize the basic measurement units that comprise the International System of Units (SI), better known informally as the metric system? We measure the universe in seconds (s), meters (m), kilograms (kg), amperes (A), kelvins (K), moles (mol), and candelas (cd) — and any student going on to study science in high school or college should know how these standard metric units (SI units) work.

Take a look at just a few of the places that scientific and engineering measurements interact with your life every day:

You can download and print your very own copy of the 2022 World Metrology Day poster at worldmetrologyday.org — it’s just the thing for your homeschool bulletin board! And if you have any serious stamp collectors in your homeschool, there are hundreds of metric-system stamps and SI-system stamps you can explore from countries all around the world.

What scientific measurements have you taken in your homeschool this Leo Term? 😊

❡ Explore more: For a quick homeschool review of the metric system and other systems of weights and measures, turn to page 394 in your River Houses almanac. 📚

❡ Here, said the year: This is one of our occasional posts on Homeschool Holidays & Anniversaries. Print your own copy of our River Houses calendar of educational events to follow along with us, and add your name to our weekly mailing list to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🗞

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🦅 FRIDAY BIRD FAMILIES: Bulbuls, Starlings, Waxwings, and Allies

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Every Friday we invite you and your homeschool students to learn about a different group of North American birds in your recommended bird guide. It’s a great way to add a few minutes of informal science, geography, natural history, and imagination to your homeschool schedule throughout the year.

This week’s birds (six different families) are the Bulbuls (pages 422–423), the Starlings (pages 422–423), the Waxwings (pages 424–425), the Silky-Flycatchers (pages 424–425), the Olive Warblers (pages 426–427), and the Accentors (pages 426–427). That may seem like a lot, but only a few members of these families occur in North America.

If you’re teaching younger children, the way to use these posts is just to treat your bird guide as a picture book and spend a few minutes each week looking at all the interesting birds they may see one day. With that, your little lesson is done.

If you have older students, one of your objectives should be to help them become fluent with a technical reference book that’s packed with information, the kind of book they will encounter in many different fields of study. Here’s how your bird guide introduces this week’s birds:

BULBULS — Family Pycnonotidae. Noisy, active Old World family of the tropics and subtropics. Species: 123 World, 1 N.A. [North America]

STARLINGS — Family Sturnidae. Widespread Old World family. Chunky and glossy birds; most species are gregarious and bold. Species: 117 World, 3 N.A.

WAXWINGS — Family Bombycillidae. Waxy tips on secondary feathers are often indistinct, and sometimes they are absent altogether. All waxwings have sleek crests and silky plumage, and both N.A. species have yellow-tipped tails. Where berries are ripening, waxwings come to feast in amiable, noisy flocks. Species: 3 World, 2 N.A.

SILKY-FLYCATCHERS — Family Ptilogonatidae. This New World tropical family of slender, crested birds is closely related to the waxwings. The family’s common name described their soft, sleek plumage and agility in catching insects on the wing. Species: 4 World, 2 N.A.

OLIVE WARBLERS — Family Peucedramidae. Recently placed in its own family because relationships are uncertain. Species: 1 World, 1 N.A.

ACCENTORS — Family Prunellidae. Small Eurasian family. One species strays into N.A. Species: 13 World, 1 N.A.

When you’re training your young naturalists, teach them to ask and answer from their bird guide some of the first questions any naturalist would ask about a new group — about the Waxwing family, for example. How many species? (Only three worldwide.) Are there any near us? (Two species in North America, and the individual maps will give us more detail.) What are their distinctive features? (Crested, waxy tips on secondaries, yellow-tipped tails, and so on.)

Pick a representative species or two to look at in detail each week and read the entry aloud, or have your students study it and then narrate it back to you, explaining all the information it contains. This week, for the Waxwing family, why not investigate the Cedar Waxwing (page 424), a widespread species found all across North America.

All sorts of biological information is packed into the brief species descriptions in your bird guide — can your students tease it out? How big is the Cedar Waxwing? (7¼ inches long.) What is its scientific name? (Bombycilla cedrorum.) Will you be able to find this species where you live? At what times of year and in what habitat? (Study the range map and range description carefully to answer those questions, and see the book’s back flap for a map key.) Do the males and females look alike? The adults and juveniles? What song or call does this species make? How can you distinguish it from similar species? (The text and illustrations should answer all these questions.)

Waxwings are beautiful birds with unusual lax plumage that gives them a very soft and smooth appearance, especially at close range. In the summer they hawk insects like flycatchers, but in the winter they are berry-feeders and will often gather by the dozens in a cherry or crab apple tree and strip the branches bare in a matter of minutes. Their call is a high buzzy trill and whistle that they often give in flight and while flocking, and they’re often heard before they are seen.

For a species in the Starling family this week, take a look at the European Starling (page 422), one of the most common and widespread birds in North America, but not a native: our “American” Starlings were introduced from Europe in the late 1800s and have since become naturalized across the entire continent. Bold, squeaky, and squawky, they are speckled in the winter but glossy purple-black in the summer (when they will happily invade the eaves of your house to nest).

The other families this week occur only around the margins of our continent. The Red-whiskered Bulbul (page 422) is an Asian species that has escaped from captivity and become naturalized in a few places in Florida; the handsome Phainopepla (page 424) and the Olive Warbler (page 426) are both Central American species that cross a short distance into the United States in the southwest; and the Siberian Accentor (page 426) is an Asian bird that sometimes occurs in western Alaska.

You can do little ten-minute lessons of this kind with any of the species in your bird guide that catch your interest. Pick one that lives near you, or that looks striking, or that has a strange name, and explore.

In all these Friday Bird Families posts, our aim is not to present a specific set of facts to memorize. We hope instead to provide examples and starting points that you and your students can branch away from in many different directions. We also hope to show how you can help your students develop the kind of careful skills in reading, observation, and interpretation that they will need in all their future academic work.

What ornithological observations and naturalistical notes have you made in your homeschool this Leo Term? 😊

❡ Homeschool birds: We think bird study is one of the best subjects you can take up in a homeschool environment. It’s suitable for all ages, it can be made as elementary or as advanced as you wish, it can be made solitary or social, and birds can be found just about anywhere at any season of the year. Why not track your own homeschool bird observations using the free eBird website sponsored by Cornell University. It’s a great way to learn more about what’s in your local area and about how bird populations change from season to season. 🐦

❡ Vade mecum: The front matter in your bird guide (pages 6–13) explains a little bit about basic bird biology and about some of the technical terminology used throughout the book — why not have your students study it as a special project. Have them note particularly the diagrams showing the parts of a bird (pages 10–11) so they’ll be able to tell primaries from secondaries and flanks from lores. 🦉

❡ Words for birds: You may not think of your homeschool dictionary as a nature reference, but a comprehensive dictionary will define and explain many of the standard scientific terms you will encounter in biology and natural history, although it will not generally contain the proper names of species or other taxonomic groups that aren’t part of ordinary English. (In other words, you’ll find “flamingo” but not Phoenicopterus, the flamingo genus.) One of the most important things students should be taught to look for in the dictionary is the information on word origins: knowing the roots of scientific terms makes it much easier to understand them and remember their meaning. 📖

❡ Come, here’s the map: Natural history and geography are deeply interconnected. One of the first questions you should teach your students to ask about any kind of animal or plant is, “What is its range? Where (in the world) does it occur?” Our recommended homeschool reference library includes an excellent world atlas that will help your students appreciate many aspects of biogeography, the science of the geographical distribution of living things. 🌎

❡ Nature notes: This is one of our regular Friday Bird Families posts for homeschool naturalists. Print your own copy of our River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow along with us! You can also add your name to our free weekly mailing list to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🐦 🦉 🦆 🦃 🦅

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🇨🇦 HOMESCHOOL MUSIC & HISTORY: “To find the hand of Franklin”

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Cultural understanding develops from the storehouse of facts and experiences that you impart to your homeschool students as you teach them from day to day. To appreciate a complex and beautiful piece of art or literature or music, your students must already know a great deal about the world — names, places, people, and events that may seem at first to be disconnected.

This post is about a piece of music, but it begins with an anniversary. On this day in 1845, one of the most famous sailing voyages of the nineteenth century began — and with it, one of that century’s greatest mysteries.

On the 19th of May in 1845, British admiral Sir John Franklin sailed from Greenhithe in England with two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, in the hopes of discovering the Northwest Passage, the postulated route from the Davis Strait off the coast of Greenland to the Beaufort Sea above Alaska that would eliminate the need to sail all the way around the tip of South America (“around the Horn”) to get to the Far East. They sailed from Greenhithe on this day, and Franklin and his expedition, 129 men in all, were never heard from again.

“HMS Erebus in the Ice” by Francois Etienne Musin (1846). (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

You could develop an entire homeschool curriculum based on the Franklin expedition, its disappearance, and the search for the Northwest Passage. Many additional ships were sent in search of Franklin, and some did find scraps of evidence. Interviews with Inuit hunters turned up reports of starving men seen years before who appeared to be shipwreck survivors. But the ships themselves and what happened to them remained a mystery.

Or at least it did until quite recently. For a number of years the Canadian national park service has been conducting research on the fate of the Franklin expedition, and in 2014, in a remarkable feat of underwater archeology, they discovered HMS Erebus, almost completely intact, resting on the sea floor near King William Island in Nunavut (Northwest Territories), in the Canadian arctic. Two years later, in 2016, they discovered HMS Terror about 50 miles farther north. You can read about these remarkable discoveries on the Parks Canada website:

But this is an educational post about a piece of music.

The great Canadian folk singer Stan Rogers, who died tragically in an airplane fire in 1983, wrote a small masterpiece called “Northwest Passage” that has become a kind of second national anthem for Canada. It tells the story of a modern traveler driving along well-paved highways in the far north, and imagining the explorers, like Franklin, who went before him.

Here’s the trailer for a documentary film on Rogers’ life and art, “One Warm Line,” that features this song. With the historical background above — the names and places and events — your students will be able to appreciate its rich cultural and historical context and understand what a real gem it is:

And here’s a studio recording of the full song:

Why not sit down this week with your students and have a special lesson in art, culture, geography, and history — an example of homeschooling at its best. Take out your homeschool atlas, and listen to Stan Rogers, and follow the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea.

What artistic discoveries have you made in your homeschool this Leo Term? 😊

❡ Lift every voice: This is one of our occasional Homeschool Arts & Music posts. Add your name to our weekly mailing list and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🗞

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