The River Houses Homeschool Network

🏡 WELCOME! (Pinned Post)

10 May 2020 by Bob O'Hara

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! 😊

🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 31 May 2020

31 May 2020 by Bob O'Hara

Click to: riverhouses.org/2020-05-31

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! Visit our River Houses calendar page (riverhouses.org/calendars) and print your own homeschool calendars and planners for the entire year.

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is South Dakota, and our COUNTRIES are Singapore 🇸🇬, Slovakia 🇸🇰, Slovenia 🇸🇮, and the Solomon Islands 🇸🇧. (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 gibbous and waxing — 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 342–357 in your almanac (riverhouses.org/books). Browse through our many astronomy posts for even more!

🗓 TODAY, Sunday (31 May 2020) — Today is the 152nd day of 2020; there are 214 days remaining in this leap year. Learn more about different kinds of modern and historical calendars on pages 350–356 in your River Houses almanac (riverhouses.org/books). 📚 Today is the last day of Leo Term and the last day of the River Houses academic year. 🗓 It’s also the birthday of the great American poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892), who contained multitudes. 🖋

🗓 💪 Hercules Term 2020 Begins

Monday (1 June 2020) — Today is the first day of HERCULES TERM, our summer term in the River Houses, named for the Great Hero of the Heavens. 💪 Today is also the birthday of the great English poet of the sea John Masefield (1878–1967), author of the finest thing Herman Melville never said. ⚓️ Our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the first week of June is the anonymous medieval song “Sumer is i-cumin in,” for the beginning of Hercules Term. ⛱ Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us throughout the year. 🖋

Tuesday (2 June 2020) — Today is the birthday of poet and novelist Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), whose works have been loved and loathed by high school English students for generations. 📚 Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II was crowned on this day in 1953, making her now the longest-reigning monarch in British history and the longest-serving female head of state in world history. 👑 And since this is the first Tuesday of the month, today we’ll invite you to browse a new Dewey Decimal class with your students on your next visit to your local library. This month: the Literary 800s. 📚

Wednesday (3 June 2020) — Today is the birthday of Scottish physician and scientist James Hutton (1726–1797), one of the pioneers of modern geology. ⛏ And our Wednesday tour of World Heritage Sites this week will take you to the Historic Town of Banská Štiavnica in Slovakia. 🇸🇰

Thursday (4 June 2020) — On this day in 1783, the brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier made the first public demonstration of their hot air balloon at Annonay in the south of France, and the age of flight began. 🎈

Friday (5 June 2020) — The first installment of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published on this day in 1851 in the National Era newspaper. 📰 And on this day in 1989, as a popular uprising against the Chinese communist government was being brutally suppressed in Beijing, a lone man near Tiananmen Square ran out into the street and for a few minutes stopped an entire column of tanks from advancing. Photographs of “the Tank Man” have since become emblems of freedom worldwide — except in China, where they are censored. For a brief history of communism in China, see page 424 in your River Houses history encyclopedia (riverhouses.org/books). 🇨🇳 🗽 Our Friday Bird Families post this week will introduce you to the Wagtails and Pipits! Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us throughout the year. 🦅 And, there’s a full moon tonight, so that means we’ll have a report on student research opportunities from the River Houses Lunar Society (riverhouses.org/lunar). 🌕

Saturday (6 June 2020) — The invasion of Normandy, code-named Operation Overlord, began on this day, D-Day, in 1944. It was the largest amphibious military operation in history and it began the liberation of Western Europe from Nazi occupation. For a brief review, see page 398 in your homeschool history encyclopedia (riverhouses.org/books). 🇫🇷 And since this is the first Saturday of the month, we’ll post our regular monthly preview today of some of the astronomical events you and your students can watch for over the next few weeks. 🔭

Sunday (7 June 2020) — On this day in 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia presented a resolution to the Continental Congress “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.” The formal adoption of the Lee Resolution less than a month later, on 2 July 1776, established American independence. 🇺🇸

🥂 OUR WEEKLY TOAST, for all summer travelers: “May the experience of the wanderer endear him more firmly to his native home.”

❡ 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 variety in toasting!”). What will you toast this week? 🥂

🌍 🇸🇮 EVERYTHING FLOWS: Slovenia in south-central Europe is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the beautiful Soča River, which flows down the Slovenian Alps into Italy and the Adriatic. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas (riverhouses.org/books), and you can read more about it in the Soča River entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

The Soča River near Bovec, Slovenia. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

❡ Let the river run: 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 691–693), 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 (riverhouses.org/newsletter) 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 (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us. 🗓

🌎 🇺🇸 SUNDAY STATES: South Dakota, Singapore, the Solomon Islands, and More

31 May 2020 by Bob O'Hara

Click to: riverhouses.org/2020-south-dakota

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 (riverhouses.org/books) includes a current world almanac, a world atlas, and a history encyclopedia that make these reviews fun and easy. Our 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 420), so this week’s state is:

🇺🇸
South Dakota State Bird and Flower
SOUTH DAKOTA (the 40th state, 2 November 1889) — The Coyote State. Capital: Pierre. South Dakota can be found on page 585 in your almanac and on plates 39 and 142 in your atlas. Name origin: “Sioux word ‘Dakota,’ meaning ‘friend’ or ‘ally’” (almanac page 422). State bird: Ring-necked Pheasant (bird guide page 60). Website: sd.gov.

❡ Little lessons: You can teach a hundred little lessons with our state-of-the-week, using your reference library (riverhouses.org/books) 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. 😊

❡ Explore more: If you’re planning an extended unit-study of one or more of the U.S. states, be sure to look into the primary source materials for teachers available at the Library of Congress.

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

🇸🇬 SINGAPORE in southeastern Asia. Population: 6,102,937. Capital: Singapore. Government: Parliamentary republic. Website: www.gov.sg (in English).
🇸🇰 SLOVAKIA in east-central Europe. Population: 5,443,336. Capital: Bratislava. Government: Parliamentary republic. Website: www.government.gov.sk (in English and Slovak).
🇸🇮 SLOVENIA in southeastern Europe. Population: 2,102,538. Capital: Ljubljana. Government: Parliamentary republic. Website: www.gov.si (in English and Slovenian).
🇸🇧 SOLOMON ISLANDS in the western Pacific Ocean. Population: 672,631. Capital: Honiara. Government: Parliamentary democracy under constitutional monarchy. Website: www.parliament.gov.sb (in English).

These all appear in your current almanac, atlas, and history encyclopedia as well (riverhouses.org/books). 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) did you make in your homeschool this past 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 (riverhouses.org/books) 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 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 (riverhouses.org/calendars) 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 (riverhouses.org/newsletter) to get more great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox every week. 🇺🇸 🌎

🌟 WATCHERS OF THE SKIES: Hymn to the North Star

30 May 2020 by Bob O'Hara

Click to: riverhouses.org/2020-north-star

Our monthly Great Star for May has been Polaris, the North Star. Many of our other monthly stars rise and set with the seasons, but Polaris is always there, every night, keeping its post and orienting us to the world — and that’s why it’s our star for May, the end of our homeschool academic year, as so many young students begin their own independent journeys.

As May comes to its end, William Cullen Bryant provides us with an extra homeschool poem-of-the-week to remind us of that very idea: other stars may rise and set for us in this turbulent world, but if you fix your sights on Polaris, you’ll never lose your way.

Hymn to the North Star

The sad and solemn night
Hath yet her multitude of cheerful fires;
The glorious host of light
Walk the dark hemisphere till she retires;
All through her silent watches, gliding slow,
Her constellations come, and climb the heavens, and go.

Day, too, hath many a star
To grace his gorgeous reign, as bright as they:
Through the blue fields afar,
Unseen, they follow in his flaming way:
Many a bright lingerer, as the eve grows dim,
Tells what a radiant troop arose and set with him.

And thou dost see them rise,
Star of the Pole! and thou dost see them set.
Alone, in thy cold skies,
Thou keep’st thy old unmoving station yet,
Nor join’st the dances of that glittering train,
Nor dipp’st thy virgin orb in the blue western main.

There, at morn’s rosy birth,
Thou lookest meekly through the kindling air,
And eve, that round the earth
Chases the day, beholds thee watching there;
There noontide finds thee, and the hour that calls
The shapes of polar flame to scale heaven’s azure walls.

Alike, beneath thine eye,
The deeds of darkness and of light are done;
High towards the star-lit sky
Towns blaze — the smoke of battle blots the sun —
The night-storm on a thousand hills is loud —
And the strong wind of day doth mingle sea and cloud.

On thy unaltering blaze
The half-wrecked mariner, his compass lost,
Fixes his steady gaze,
And steers, undoubting, to the friendly coast;
And they who stray in perilous wastes, by night,
Are glad when thou dost shine to guide their footsteps right.

And, therefore, bards of old,
Sages, and hermits of the solemn wood,
Did in thy beams behold
A beauteous type of that unchanging good,
That bright eternal beacon, by whose ray
The voyager of time should shape his heedful way.

William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) was one of the most famous writers — and perhaps one of the most famous public figures — of nineteenth-century America. His life began in straining poverty in rural New England; upon his death he received a vast public funeral in New York City, and the grounds of the New York Public Library were renamed Bryant Park in his honor.

Once upon a time, Bryant’s famous meditation on nature and mortality, “Thanatopsis,” was memorized by school children across America. And while it’s true that Bryant’s classical literary style is somewhat out of fashion today, fashions in literature, like fashions in all things, go through cycles, and his popularity may rise again. For something different this summer, why not encourage your homescholars to explore some of Bryant’s work and see what it might offer to us once again today.

What celestial sights, astronomical apparitions, and literary meditations did you examine in your homeschool this past Leo Term? 🔭

❡ Places to go: Two historic houses associated with William Cullen Bryant are now museums: the Bryant Homestead in Cummington, Massachusetts, and the Clayton–Cedarmere Estates on Long Island, New York. The New York Public Library is located in Bryant Park in Manhattan, where a William Cullen Bryant Memorial also stands. Why not get out your homeschool atlas (riverhouses.org/books) and track them down today. 🗺

❡ Choose something like a star: Teaching your students to recognize the constellations is one of the simplest and most enduring gifts you can give them. Your recommended backyard star guide and homeschool world atlas (riverhouses.org/books) both contain charts of the constellations that will show you the all the highlights. Find a dark-sky spot near you this month and spend some quality homeschool time beneath the starry vault. 🌌

❡ Star bright: If you’d like some light and easy homeschool astronomy lessons, download and print a copy of our annual River Houses Star Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us month by month as we make twelve heavenly friends-for-life over the course of the year. 🌟

❡ Watchers of the skies: This is one of our regular Homeschool Astronomy posts, and it’s also one of our Language & Literature posts! Add your name to our River Houses mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox every week. 🖋

🦅 FRIDAY BIRD FAMILIES: Indigobirds, Whydahs, Weavers, Estrildids, and Old World Sparrows

29 May 2020 by Horace the Otter 🦦

Click to: riverhouses.org/2020-indigobirds

Every Friday we invite you and your homeschool students to learn about a different group of North American birds in your recommended bird guide (riverhouses.org/books). 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 and escaped species only, and only one species from these four groups has spread widely and become naturalized across the continent.

[See attached blog post for images and video]

If you’re teaching younger children, the way to use these weekly posts is just to treat your bird guide as a picture book and spend a few minutes every Friday 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 are the bird guide’s introductions to this week’s groups, written in the customary telegraphic style:

“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 the 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 friendly House Sparrow (page 428), one of the most common birds in North America and a species every homeschool naturalist should know.

[See attached blog post for images and video]

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….

[See attached blog post for images and video]

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.

[See attached blog post for images and video]

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 is 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, and birds can be found just about anywhere at any season of the year. Why not track your own homeschool bird observations on 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 (riverhouses.org/books) (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 (riverhouses.org/books) 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 (riverhouses.org/books) includes an excellent world atlas that will help your students appreciate many aspects of biogeography, the science of the geographical distribution of living things. 🌎

❡ Rivers in the sky: How many birds are migrating this week? You can find out from the BirdCast website, also sponsored by Cornell University, which offers daily bird migration forecasts in the spring and fall for the entire United States. 🦅

❡ 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 (riverhouses.org/newsletter) to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🐦 🦉 🦆 🦃 🦅

🌍 🇷🇸 🇽🇰 WEEKLY WORLD HERITAGE: The Medieval Monuments of Kosovo

27 May 2020 by Bob O'Hara

Click to: riverhouses.org/2020-serbia

Serbia in southeastern Europe is one of our homeschool countries-of-the-week, so why not spend a few minutes today learning about one of Serbia’s World Heritage Sites: the Medieval Monuments of Kosovo.

The Visoki Dečani Monastery in Kosovo. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

The Medieval Monuments of Kosovo World Heritage Site consists of four groups of historic church buildings that reflect the religious history of the region (a region currently in dispute between the governments of Serbia and Kosovo; UNESCO treats it as part of Serbia):

“The four edifices of the site reflect the high points of the Byzantine–Romanesque ecclesiastical culture, with its distinct style of wall painting, which developed in the Balkans between the 13th and 17th centuries. The Dečani Monastery was built in the mid-14th century for the Serbian king Stefan Dečanski and is also his mausoleum. The Patriarchate of Peć Monastery is a group of four domed churches featuring series of wall paintings. The 13th-century frescoes of the Church of Holy Apostles are painted in a unique, monumental style. Early 14th-century frescoes in the church of the Holy Virgin of Ljevisa represent the appearance of the new so-called Palaiologian Renaissance style, combining the influences of the eastern Orthodox Byzantine and the Western Romanesque traditions. The style played a decisive role in subsequent Balkan art.“ (UNESCO World Heritage Centre #724)

The site’s buildings are particularly noted for their many narrative murals.

“This extensive Serbian cycle showing the life of Saint Nicholas was painted from 1673–74 by Radul, the best-known Serbian artist in the late 17th century. The tiny Saint Nicholas Chapel, built in 1337, is part of the Monastery of the Patriarchate of Pec.” (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 online at the UNESCO 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 (riverhouses.org/2019-wh-map), available for the cost of shipping. Why not add them both to your own homeschool library. 🗺

What world treasures did you explore in your homeschool this Leo Term? 😊

❡ Books in the running brooks: You can always turn to your River Houses almanac, atlas, and history encyclopedia (riverhouses.org/books) for more information about any of our countries-of-the-week. The almanac has profiles of all the nations of the world on pages 745–852; 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 (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us as we tour the planet, and add your name to our weekly mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🌍

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

26 May 2020 by Bob O'Hara

Click to: riverhouses.org/2020-homeward-bound

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 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:

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

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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:

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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:

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Maybe someday we’ll have a great big River Houses homeschool choir and a “Homeward Bound” version of our very own. 🎵

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. Add your name to our River Houses mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) to get posts like these delivered right to your mailbox, and print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) to follow along with us as we visit forty-eight of our favorite friends over the course of the year. 📖

📚 WRITING TIPS from Jason Reynolds and the Library of Congress

26 May 2020 by Bob O'Hara

Click to: riverhouses.org/2020-jason-reynolds

If you have an aspiring writer in your homeschool, why not tune in to some tips from young-adult author Jason Reynolds, this year’s official National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature at the Library of Congress:

➢ Jason Reynolds: Two Writing Exercises for Young Writers

Reynolds invites students to think about using frames as a storytelling device, and about inventing a special recipe — not just for food, but for anything you want to create, real or imaginary — and using that recipe as an element in a story.

[See attached blog post for images and video]

This is just one of the many Resources for Families that are available at the Library of Congress — why not explore them all for your homeschool! 📚

What treasures did you discover (online or off) in your library this past Leo Term? 😊

❡ Dukedoms large enough: Have you found all the local libraries in your area? There may be more than you realize! The WorldCat Library Finder will help you find all the library collections near you — public and private, large and small — and the WorldCat catalog itself will help you locate the closest copy of almost any book in the world. 😊

❡ Books in the running brooks: The sidebar on the River Houses website (riverhouses.org) has links to several important online library collections that we like to explore, as well as permanent links to WorldCat and the WorldCat Library Finder. Why not sit yourself down at a large screen for a while (rather than a phone) and give them a browse. 😊

❡ When in doubt, go to the library: This is one of our regular Homeschool Books & Libraries posts. Add your name to our weekly mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 📚

🖋 “AFTER A HUNDRED YEARS / Nobody knows the Place”

25 May 2020 by Bob O'Hara

An extra homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Emily Dickinson, for Memorial Day.

After a hundred years
Nobody knows the Place
Agony that enacted there
Motionless as Peace

Weeds triumphant ranged
Strangers strolled and spelled
At the lone Orthography
Of the Elder Dead

Winds of Summer Fields
Recollect the way —
Instinct picking up the Key
Dropped by memory —

Old South Street Cemetery, Fitchburg, Massachusetts

What other wonderful words have you studied in your homeschool this Leo Term?

❡ Here, said the year: This is one of our regular homeschool poems-of-the-week. Add your name to our River Houses mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) to get posts like these delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 📖

🇺🇸 MEMORIAL DAY 2020

24 May 2020 by Bob O'Hara

Click to: riverhouses.org/2020-memorial-day

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):

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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 (riverhouses.org/books) 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 been studying in your homeschool this Leo Term?

❡ Stay up to date: This is one of our regular Homeschool Holidays & Anniversaries posts. Add your name to our weekly mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🗓

🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 24 May 2020

24 May 2020 by Bob O'Hara

Click to: riverhouses.org/2020-05-24

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

🐦 🦅 May is Bird Migration Month in the River Houses, and throughout the month we’ve been sharing an assortment of extra homeschool notes on one of the world’s most wonderful natural phenomena.

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is North Dakota, and our COUNTRIES are Senegal 🇸🇳, Serbia 🇷🇸, Seychelles 🇸🇨, and Sierra Leone 🇸🇱. (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 a waxing crescent — a good time for stargazing! 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 342–357 in your almanac (riverhouses.org/books). Browse through our many astronomy posts for even more!

🗓 TODAY, Sunday (24 May 2020) — Today is the 145th day of 2020; there are 221 days remaining in this leap year. Learn more about different kinds of modern and historical calendars on pages 350–356 in your River Houses almanac (riverhouses.org/books). 📚 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 (riverhouses.org/books). 👑 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. ⚡️

Monday (25 May 2020) — Today is Memorial Day in the United States, the day we remember the nation’s war dead. 🇺🇸 Today is also 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! 🚀

Tuesday (26 May 2020) — It’s National Paper Airplane Day! ✈️

Wednesday (27 May 2020) — It’s World Otter Day! Our mascot Horace the Otter approves! 🦦 It’s also 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”). 🍇 And our Wednesday tour of World Heritage Sites this week will take you to the Medieval Monuments of Kosovo in Serbia. 🇷🇸

Thursday (28 May 2020) — 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. 🌏 🌑 🌞

Friday (29 May 2020) — 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 (riverhouses.org/books) ⚔️ 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. 🌏 🌑 🌞 And on this day in 1953, mountaineers Edmund Hillary and Tenzig Norgay became the first climbers ever to reach the summit of Mount Everest. 🏔 Our Friday Bird Families post this week will introduce you to the Indigobirds and Whydahs, the Weavers, the Estrildid Finches, and the Old World Sparrows. Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us throughout the year. 🦅

Saturday (30 May 2020) — The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., was dedicated on this day in the year 1922. 🏛 Today is also the birthday of the great voice actor Mel Blanc (1908–1989), “the man of a thousand voices,” who gave us Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety Bird, Sylvester the Cat, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, Marvin the Martian, Pepé Le Pew, Speedy Gonzales, Wile E. Coyote, Road Runner, and even the Tasmanian Devil. 😺

Sunday (31 May 2020) — Today is the last day of Leo Term and the last day of the River Houses academic year. Hercules Term, our summer term, begins tomorrow. 🗓 Today is also the birthday of the great American poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892), who contained multitudes. 🖋

🥂 OUR WEEKLY TOAST, for Memorial Day: “May freedom’s fire never go out.”

🌍 🇷🇸 EVERYTHING FLOWS: Serbia in southeastern Europe is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Great Morava, one of the principal rivers of Serbia. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas (riverhouses.org/books), and you can read more about it in the Great Morava entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

The Great Morava near Lapovo in central Serbia. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

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

🌎 🇺🇸 SUNDAY STATES: North Dakota, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and More

24 May 2020 by Bob O'Hara

Click to: riverhouses.org/2020-north-dakota

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.

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North Dakota State Bird and Flower
NORTH DAKOTA (the 39th state, 2 November 1889) — The Peace Garden State. Capital: Bismarck. North Dakota can be found on page 581 in your almanac and on plates 39 and 142 in your atlas. Name origin: “Sioux word ‘Dakota’, meaning ‘friend’ or ‘ally’” (almanac page 422). State bird: Western Meadowlark (bird guide page 530). Website: www.nd.gov.

❡ Explore more: If you’re planning an extended unit-study of one or more of the U.S. states, be sure to look into the primary source materials for teachers available at the Library of Congress.

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

🇸🇳 SENEGAL in western Africa. Population: 15,377,009. Capital: Dakar. Government: Presidential republic. Website: www.sec.gouv.sn (in French).
🇷🇸 SERBIA in southeastern Europe. Population: 7,045,162. Capital: Belgrade. Government: Parliamentary republic. Website: www.srbija.gov.rs (in Serbian and English).
🇸🇨 SEYCHELLES in the Indian Ocean. Population: 95,321. Capital: Victoria. Government: Presidential republic. Website: www.egov.sc (in English).
🇸🇱 SIERRA LEONE on the west coast of Africa. Population: 6,466,064. Capital: Freetown. Government: Presidential republic. Website: statehouse.gov.sl (in English).

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

🐦 WHAT BIRDS Are Migrating Through Your Neighborhood?

23 May 2020 by Bob O'Hara

Click to: riverhouses.org/2020-ebird-charts

May is Bird Migration Month in the River Houses — we think bird study is one of the best subjects you can take up in a homeschool environment. But how can you find out what birds are present and migrating through your local area? A good bird guide will give you a general idea, but what about week by week in your specific state, county, or town?

For that information you can turn to the wonderful eBird.org website, sponsored by Cornell University. eBird is a big site with many features and services, and it will not only let you record your own bird observations, but will also show you summary data for any part of the country (or the world).

Suppose you’re a homeschooler in Minot, North Dakota (to select a random location). Minot is in Ward County, so if you use eBird’s geographical browsing tool you can navigate your way to the seasonal charts for Ward County, North Dakota. Here’s a sample of what they look like:

Seasonal chart for birds of Ward County, North Dakota. (Image: eBird.org.)

Can your students see how to interpret this chart? (That’s an important academic skill right there!) Each row represents a species of bird: Bobolink, Western Meadowlark, Eastern Meadowlark, and so on. The columns represent the weeks and months of the year, from January to December. The thickness of the green bars indicates how frequently each species is reported during a given week. For example: the first few Bobolinks begin to arrive during the first two weeks of May; they become more common by the end of the month and are regularly seen through June and early July. By August and September, although they’re still present, they aren’t seen as frequently as they were during June and July; and then by the end of September they’re gone, except for an occasional straggler.

So if you’re a homeschooler in Minot, North Dakota, the Bobolinks arrived at the beginning of this month, as did the Baltimore Orioles; about this time (the latter part of May) the Orchard Orioles are joining them. Western Meadowlarks, Red-winged Blackbirds, and several other species arrived earlier in the season and by now, in late May, they have settled in for the summer.

But where can you go to see these birds? Switch to the map view in eBird, and you’ll get something like this — it’s a mid-May map for Western Meadowlarks in the Ward County, North Dakota, area:

Western Meadowlark records in the Ward County region of North Dakota in mid-May. (Image: eBird.org.)

If your students can understand and interpret a professional map like this they’ll be ready for all kinds of academic science. What the map shows is all the Western Meadowlark sighting locations that have been entered into eBird for this region of North Dakota. The red symbols stand for observations made the last 30 days; the blue symbols for observations older than 30 days (and often going back many years). The larger symbols are eBird “hotspots” — public locations such as parks or wildlife refuges that anyone (including you and your students) can visit and explore.

But what if you don’t even know what a Western Meadowlark is? 😊 We do recommend an excellent bird guide for all homeschool families — printed books are often the best educational tools, especially for young people — but that information is also available online in eBird. If you click the species name in the bar chart, you’ll get a detailed profile that looks like this:

Western Meadowlark profile from eBird.org.

The eBird website is a wonderful resource that can become a regular part of your homeschool science and natural history studies. Bookmark it and give it a browse, and see what avian visitors are passing through your homeschool neighborhood this month. 😊

❡ Books in the running brooks: Our recommended homeschool reference library (riverhouses.org/books) includes an excellent bird guide that would serve your homeschool well. Many other similar guides are also available — find one that’s a good fit for your family and take it with you on all your outings, whether far afield or just out to the backyard. 🦉

❡ Rivers in the sky: How many birds are migrating this week overall? You can find out from the BirdCast website, also sponsored by Cornell University, which offers daily bird migration forecasts in the spring and fall for the entire United States. 🦅

❡ Nature notes: This is one of our regular Homeschool Natural History posts. Add your name to our weekly mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🐦

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