The River Houses Homeschool Newtork

Welcome! (Pinned post)

1 November 2018 by Bob O'Hara

First time visitor? The River Houses are going to be a new type of local homeschool network — we are now in the planning stages. Please read more about us, subscribe to our weekly newsletter, or follow our Facebook page to keep track of our progress — thank you!

As we get underway, please pardon the surrounding construction. A few light switches may not work yet, and some of the floorboards are loose. But no great thing was ever built overnight, and it is in the building that we should take delight. 😊

🖋 WONDERFUL WORDS: Happy Birthday to Emily Dickinson!

10 December 2018 by Bob O'Hara

Today is the birthday of the great American poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), so she provides us with our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the second week of December — a poem for all lovers of books and language:

He ate and drank the precious Words —
His Spirit grew robust —
He knew no more that he was poor,
Nor that his frame was Dust —

He danced along the dingy Days
And this Bequest of Wings
Was but a Book — What Liberty
A loosened spirit brings —

Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, a small farming town in the Connecticut River valley. Her father was a town lawyer, and she grew up with an older brother and a younger sister who were the focal points of her home life. (“Mother does not care for thought,” she sadly reported.) Dickinson’s poetry came to be appreciated only in the twentieth century — almost none of it was published during her lifetime — and she is now regarded as one of the most important writers in American history.

Most of Dickinson’s poems are written in a traditional form, although they often employ striking and innovative imagery. “He ate and drank the precious Words,” for example, uses the same meter found in hundreds of Protestant hymns, the so-called eights-and-sixes arrangement. For a little lesson, have your students count the syllables: they will find a perfect 8-6-8-6 pattern throughout. The rhyme scheme in this poem is also regular, but not so heavy as to produce a sing-songy result — I make it out to be ABCB DFGF, with the second and fourth lines rhyming in each stanza.

Introduce your homescholars to Emily Dickinson this week on the occasion of her birthday and they’ll have a new friend for life.

What wonderful words have you found and what literary discoveries have you made in your homeschool lately? 😊

❡ His Spirit grew robust: 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. 😊

❡ Explore more: The Poetry Foundation’s website (poetryfoundation.org) includes biographical notes and examples of the work of many important poets (including Emily Dickinson) that are suitable for high school students and homeschool teachers.

❡ Here, said the year: This post is one of our regular homeschool poems-of-the-week. Print your own River Houses poetry calendar for the whole year at riverhouses.org/calendars and follow along with us as we visit forty-eight of our favorite friends.

❡ Find all our Language & Literature posts on Facebook at #RHwords.

🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 9 December 2018

9 December 2018 by Bob O'Hara

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! Print your own River Houses calendar for the year at riverhouses.org/calendars.

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Kentucky, and our COUNTRIES are Ethiopia 🇪🇹, Fiji 🇫🇯, Finland 🇫🇮, and France 🇫🇷. (Our separate Sunday States & Countries post went up just a few minutes ago.)

🌒 THE MOON at the beginning of this week is a waxing crescent — a good time for stargazing! Track the moon’s phases each month at timeanddate.com, and dial up this week’s constellations with your River Houses star atlas (riverhouses.org/books).

(Have you noticed that we use the correct symbol for the phase of the moon each week? We do! Here’s the complete sequence from New to First Quarter to Full to Third Quarter to New again: 🌑🌒🌓🌔🌕🌖🌗🌘🌑.)

🗓 TODAY (Sunday, 9 December) — Today is the 343rd day of 2018; there are 22 days remaining in the year. Learn more about different kinds of modern and historical calendars on pages 351–357 in your River Houses almanac (riverhouses.org/books). ⬩ Today is the birthday of the great English poet and political revolutionary John Milton (1608–1674), one of the towering figures in the history of the English language. ⬩ And on this day in 1965, the much-loved special “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” with music by Vince Guaraldi, premiered on CBS television.

MONDAY (10 December) — Today is the birthday Augusta Ada (Byron) King, Countess of Lovelace (1815–1852), a pioneer of computer science (long before the field even existed). ⬩ It’s also the birthday of the great American poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886).

TUESDAY (11 December) — Today is the birthday of two very different Nobel laureates: the German microbiologist Robert Koch (1843–1910), and the Russian novelist and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008).

WEDNESDAY (12 December) — On this day in 1901 at St. John’s, Newfoundland, engineer and inventor Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937) successfully received the first trans-Atlantic radio transmission (sent from Cornwall in the U.K.).

THURSDAY (13 December) — The annual Geminid meteor shower is expected to peak tonight.

FRIDAY (14 December) — Today is the birthday of the great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601). ⬩ And on this day in 1911, Roald Amundson, Olav Bjaaland, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel, and Oscar Wisting became the first men ever to reach the South Pole.

SATURDAY (15 December) — The famous film Gone With the Wind, starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, premiered in Atlanta, Georgia, on this day in 1939. ⬩ And on this day in 1970, the Soviet spacecraft Venera 7 made the first-ever soft landing on another planet (Venus). ⬩ Our homeschool poem-of-the-week for third week of December is Christina Rossetti’s “In the Bleak Midwinter,” for the upcoming winter solstice and the Christmas holiday. Print your own River Houses poetry calendar at riverhouses.org/calendars and follow along with us throughout the year.

SUNDAY (16 December) — It’s Beethoven’s birthday! ⬩ It’s also the birthday of the English novelist Jane Austen (1775–1817). ⬩ And on this day in 1773, a group of disgruntled Bostonians disguised as Mohawk Indians dumped hundreds of pounds of tea into Boston Harbor — and “the Boston Tea Party” has been a part of American history ever since. ⬩ Also, Comet 46P/Wirtanen, the closest-approaching comet of 2018, may be bright enough to see with the naked eye this evening.

🥂 YOUR WEEKLY TOAST: “May we never envy those who are happy, but always strive to imitate them.”

❡ Toasts are a fun 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!”). Our current set of toasts are mostly taken from an old anthology called The Pic-Nic, a Collection of Recitations, and Comic Songs, Toasts, Sentiments, &c. (London, 1816). What will you toast this week?

🌎 EVERYTHING FLOWS: France is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the storied Seine, which flows through the French capital of Paris. You can chart its course in your River Houses atlas (riverhouses.org/books), and you can read more about it in the Seine River entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

The Seine River in central Paris. (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 691–692), 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!

AND DON’T FORGET: Friday the 13th comes on a Thursday this month! 😲

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

❡ Find all our weekly “Quick Freshes” posts on Facebook at #RHfreshes.

🇺🇸 SUNDAY STATES: Kentucky, Ethiopia, France, and More 🌎

9 December 2018 by Bob O'Hara

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 your recommended River Houses reference library (riverhouses.org/books) includes a current world almanac, a world atlas, and a history encyclopedia that make these reviews fun and easy. We go through the states in the traditional order of admission to the Union (almanac page 422), so this week’s state is:

🇺🇸
Kentucky State Quarter
KENTUCKY (the 15th state, 1 June 1792) — The Bluegrass State. Capital: Frankfort. Kentucky can be found on page 573 in your almanac and on plates 41 and 142 in your atlas. Name origin: “Indian word variously translated as ‘dark and bloody ground,’ ‘meadowland,’ and ‘land of tomorrow’” (almanac page 423). State bird: Northern Cardinal (bird guide page 522). Website: kentucky.gov.

❡ Little lessons: You can teach a hundred little lessons with the 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 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 world of new geographical and historical information. 😊

❡ Explore more: If you’re planning a comprehensive unit study of one or more of the U.S. states, be sure to investigate the primary source materials for teachers available from the Library of Congress. And anything you and your students want to know about state flags, seals, mottos, birds, and much more, can be found at the helpful State Symbols USA website.

This week’s countries, with their official websites, are:

🇪🇹 ETHIOPIA in eastern Africa. Population: 105,350,020. Capital: Addis Ababa. Website: www.ethiopia.gov.et (in English and Amharic).
🇫🇯 FIJI in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. Population: 920,938. Capital: Suva. Website: www.fiji.gov.fj (in English).
🇫🇮 FINLAND in northern Europe. Population: 5,518,371. Capital: Helsinki. Website: valtioneuvosto.fi (in Finnish, English, and Swedish).
🇫🇷 FRANCE in western Europe. Population: 67,106,161. Capital: Paris. Website: www.gouvernement.fr (in French and English).

These countries all appear in your current almanac, atlas, and history encyclopedia as well (riverhouses.org/books). The almanac, for example, has profiles of all 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 wondrous geographical discoveries have you made in your homeschool lately? 😊

❡ 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 practice their critical reading and thinking skills.

❡ 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? 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. ✈️ 🚞 🚗 🛳 😊

❡ Find all our weekly States & Countries posts on Facebook at #RHstates.

🎵 HOLIDAY MUSIC MONTH: Introducing John Rutter and His Carols

8 December 2018 by Bob O'Hara

Not all musical masterpieces in the classical style were written centuries ago. Why not spend a few homeschool minutes this month introducing your students to the great contemporary composer John Rutter and his modern but traditionally styled Christmas carols:

December is Holiday Music Month in the River Houses, and throughout the month we’ll be sharing an assortment of our seasonal favorites — classical and modern, sacred and secular, serious and silly — along with a variety of educational notes that will help you teach little lessons all along the way.

“Among the modern carols writers,” says Gramophone magazine, “John Rutter stands alone.” The above recording of “Candlelight Carol” was made by Rutter’s own choir, the Cambridge Singers, a group he formed in 1981. Rutter’s website (johnrutter.com) provides a wealth of information about his life and work, and it’s well worth studying by any musically inclined homescholar. Although Rutter has produced works in a variety of musical genres, it is for his traditional carols and anthems that he is best known.

Candlelight Carol

How do you capture the wind on the water?
How do you count all the stars in the sky?
How can you measure the love of a mother?
Or how can you write down a baby’s first cry?

Candlelight, angel light, firelight and star-glow
Shine on his cradle till breaking of dawn.
Gloria! Gloria in excelsis deo!
Angels are singing; the Christ child is born.

Shepherds and wise men will kneel and adore him;
Seraphim round him their vigil will keep;
Nations proclaim him their Lord and their Saviour,
But Mary will hold him and sing him to sleep. (Refrain.)

Find him at Bethlehem laid in a manger,
Christ our Redeemer asleep in the hay,
Godhead incarnate and hope of salvation,
A child with his mother that first Christmas Day. (Refrain.)

Rutter was born in 1945 and he studied music at Clare College, one of the colleges of Cambridge University in England. He later served as Clare’s Director of Music, and many school and college choirs around the world have made his Christmas carols part of their standard repertoire. Here’s a wonderful old recording of the choir of St. Olaf College in Minnesota performing Rutter’s carol “What Sweeter Music,” written to accompany a seventeenth-century Christmas poem by Robert Herrick (1591–1674):

If you send your students to your family dictionary (riverhouses.org/books) they will be able to report back that a carol is “a song of praise or joy, especially for Christmas,” and also “an old round dance often accompanied by singing.” “To carol” is therefore “to sing in a loud, joyous manner,” and specifically “to go from house to house singing Christmas songs.”

What Sweeter Music

What sweeter music can we bring
Than a carol, for to sing
The birth of this our heavenly King?

Awake the voice! Awake the string!

Dark and dull night, fly hence away,
And give the honor to this day,
That sees December turned to May.
That sees December turned to May.

Why does the chilling winter’s morn
Smile like a field beset with corn?
Or smell like a meadow newly-shorn,
Thus, on the sudden? Come and see
The cause why things thus fragrant be:
‘Tis he is born, whose quickening birth
Gives life and luster, public mirth,
To heaven, and the under-earth.

We see him come, and know him ours,
Who, with his sunshine and his showers,
Turns all the patient ground to flowers.
Turns all the patient ground to flowers.
The darling of the world is come,
And fit it is, we find a room
To welcome him. To welcome him.
The nobler part of all the house here,
is the heart

Which we will give him, and bequeath
This holly, and this ivy wreath,
To do him honour, who’s our King,
And Lord of all this revelling.

What sweeter music can we bring
Than a carol for to sing
The birth of this our heavenly King?
The birth of this our heavenly King.

I have no doubt that John Rutter’s Christmas carols, like those of the great composers of previous centuries, will continue to be popular for many generations to come. Introduce your students to these modern masterpieces and they will become their friends for life.

What artistic creations and musical discoveries are you making in your homeschool this month? 😊

❡ Musical memories: If you’d like to fill your homeschool with some beautiful background sounds this month, why not tune in to the 24-hour Holiday Channel from WQXR, the famous classical music station in New York. “Enjoy the sounds of orchestras, choirs, brass ensembles and more as we celebrate the sacred and secular sounds of the season.” I have it on almost all day. Won’t you join me? 😊 🎵

❡ Find all our Arts & Music posts on Facebook at #RHartists.

☄️ WATCHERS OF THE SKIES – December 2018

7 December 2018 by Bob O'Hara

On the first Friday of every month we post educational skywatching notes for the homeschool month ahead. Here’s the monthly northern hemisphere review for December 2018, courtesy of the Hubble Space Telescope’s website:

The more advanced sky summary from space.com provides additional details and is perfect for every serious young astronomy student:

📍 NIGHT SKY, December 2018 (space.com)

There is also a COMET ☄️ on the way! Comet 46P/Wirtanen is expected to peak around the 16th and may be visible to the naked eye at that time. Here are some excellent details from timeanddate.com:

📍 COMET 46P/Wirtanen, December 2018 (timeanddate.com.com)

Comets of this brightness (with near naked-eye visibility) don’t occur very often, so if you have a pair of binoculars it will definitely be worth taking a look.

The best general stargazing nights in December will be toward the beginning and middle of the month — the moon is new (and the sky darkest) today. As always, you also can track the moon’s phases at timeanddate.com.

What celestial observations have you made in your homeschool lately? 😊

❡ Watchers of the skies: Teaching your students to recognize the constellations is one of the simplest and most enduring gifts you can give them. The planisphere on the front of your River Houses star atlas (riverhouses.org/books) will let you dial up the northern hemisphere sky for any night of the year, and the descriptions and maps of each constellation will point out the highlights. Find a dark-sky spot near you this month and spend some quality homeschool time beneath the starry vault. 🌠 🔭 🌌

❡ Find all our “Watchers of the Skies” posts on Facebook at #RHastronomy.

🎵 HOLIDAY MUSIC MONTH: All Those Christmas Clichés

6 December 2018 by Bob O'Hara

Small children love family traditions, and grownups love family traditions, but sometimes in between there’s a teen-age and young-adult wandering phase where such things don’t seem to matter. If someone in your family is passing through that phase, don’t despair. They’ll come back to all your family traditions and be grateful for them, just like the great American singer Nancy LaMott (1951–1995):

December is Holiday Music Month in the River Houses, and throughout the month we’ll be sharing an assortment of our seasonal favorites — classical and modern, sacred and secular, serious and silly — along with a smattering of educational notes that will help you teach little lessons all along the way.

“All Those Christmas Clichés” was written by the award-winning duo of Stephen Flaherty (music) and Lynn Ahrens (lyrics), and this recording by the great Nancy LaMott is the best I’ve heard.

All Those Christmas Clichés

I’ve spent Christmas in Peoria, Christmas in Schenectady, Christmas in Las Vegas and L.A.
And I always thought it couldn’t matter less. But lately, come December, I confess
I want the tree full of toys and tinsel, I want the wreath on the red front door,
I want the elves in the yard and each sentimental card dripping glitter on the floor,
I want a roof full of plywood reindeer, I want a road full of horse-drawn sleighs:
All those Christmas clichés.

I want the turkey with all the trimmings, the turkey mom hardly ever made;
I want the gulp and the tear at the moment that I hear Johnny Mathis being played,
I want a lake full of perfect skaters, I want that fruit cake with sugar glaze:
All those Christmas clichés.

Not to mention the snow, not to mention the choir,
Not to mention the candles in the window, and chestnuts roasting on the fire
Inside a house filled with noise and laughter along a street bathed in twinkling light;
I want the bells and the drums, mistletoe and sugar plums, and kids to tuck in tight.
And as for that guy in the bright red outfit, instead of flying off he stays;
All those Christmas clichés.

I want those overblown, corny, heartwarming, Hallmark Christmas clichés.

You may have run across Lynn Ahrens’ name before: she wrote many of the songs and lyrics for the popular Schoolhouse Rock! educational programs on TV. And that points us to a whole range of little homeschool lessons you can teach this season whenever you’re listening to holiday musical favorites.

If your students take delight in some particular piece of music, just drop in a question: “I wonder who wrote that?” For many pieces of traditional music (as we noted the other day with “Past Three O’Clock”), the answer may be, “lots of different people over many generations.” But for more modern pieces, the answer is usually simpler. You’ll want to make sure your students understand the three basic roles of performer, composer (writer of the music), and lyricist (writer of the words). Sometimes these roles are combined into a single person, as with “singer-songwriters.” In other cases, each role may be held by a different person: in the recording above, LaMott is the performer, Flaherty is the composer, and Ahrens is the lyricist. Knowing the names behind a favorite piece of music will increase your students’ artistic understanding and encourage them to investigate and learn more.

What musical traditions are you following in your homeschool this month? 😊

❡ Find all our Arts & Music posts on Facebook at #RHartists.

🖋 THE HUNTER Home From the Hill

4 December 2018 by Bob O'Hara

This is the first week of Orion Term in the River Houses, named for the Great Hunter of the Heavens who is rising now each evening in the east and who will be overhead throughout the northern hemisphere winter. In honor of Orion’s appearance, our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the first week of December is a beautifully crafted little lyric by A.E. Housman (1859–1936) called “R.L.S.”

“R.L.S.” was Housman’s fellow writer and older contemporary Robert Louis Stevenson, who died in 1894. Stevenson himself wrote a short poem called “Requiem” that was later inscribed on his tomb: “This be the verse you grave for me: / Here he lies where he longed to be; / Home is the sailor, home from sea, / And the hunter home from the hill.” To commemorate Stevenson, Housman took the last two lines of “Requiem” and expanded them into a new and separate poem that imaginatively enlarges our picture of the sailor and the hunter who have at last made their way home:

R.L.S.

Home is the sailor, home from sea:
    Her far-borne canvas furled
The ship pours shining on the quay
    The plunder of the world.

Home is the hunter from the hill:
    Fast in the boundless snare
All flesh lies taken at his will
    And every fowl of air.

’Tis evening on the moorland free,
    The starlit wave is still:
Home is the sailor from the sea,
    The hunter from the hill.

When you introduce your students to a new poem, especially one in a traditional form, take your time, and don’t worry about “getting” everything right away. A good poem is a friend for life, and as with any friend, it takes several meetings to get acquainted. Before you even start to think about “meaning,” take a look at the poem’s structure. How many lines does it have? Are the lines grouped into stanzas? How many lines in each stanza? How many syllables in each line? Many traditional poems are highly structured and fit together in an almost mathematical way.

Housman was a master craftsman in the traditional style, and you can see his skill at work in this poem’s interlocking rhyme scheme. The first stanza is about the sailor, the second is about the hunter, and the third combines the two, and that’s exactly reflected in the rhyming pattern, which you can easily work out with your students. The sailor stanza ends with sea–furled–quay–world, which we’ll call ABAB. (Send your students to your family dictionary for the pronunciation of “quay.”) The hunter stanza ends with hill–snare–will–air, which we’ll call CDCD. Now look at what Housman has done with the final combined stanza. It ends with free–still–sea–hill, picking up the A-sound from the first line of the sailor stanza and the C-sound from the first line of the hunter stanza. This gives us ACAC, which perfectly ties the first two stanzas together and brings both the sailor and the hunter home.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s gravesite on Upolu, Samoa. “Home is the sailor, home from sea, / And the hunter home from the hill.” (Image: mardecortesbaja.com.)

Invite your students to keep Housman and Stevenson in mind as we pass through Orion Term and the Great Hunter makes his way up overhead and home beyond the western horizon.

What wonderful words have you found and what literary discoveries have you made in your homeschool this week? 😊

❡ The starlit wave is still: 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. 😊

❡ Explore more: The Poetry Foundation’s website (poetryfoundation.org) includes biographical notes and examples of the work of many important poets (including A.E. Housman) that are suitable for high school students and homeschool teachers.

❡ Find all our Language & Literature posts on Facebook at #RHwords.

📚 LEARNING THE LIBRARY: The Religious 200s

4 December 2018 by Bob O'Hara

Tuesday is Books & Libraries Day at the River Houses, and on the first Tuesday of each month we invite you and your homescholars to explore one of the major Dewey Decimal classes at your local library. If you start at the beginning of the River Houses year in September and run until July, you can “adopt” one major class each month and cover the whole of knowledge (!) in a year.

This month’s class is the 200s, which covers Religion. (The Dewey system is grouped into hundreds, so “the 200s” means the numbers running from 200 to 299.)

Here’s what you’ll find at your local library in the 200s:

CLASS 200 – Religion
- 200 – Religion (General)
- 210 – Philosophy & Theory of Religion
- 220 – The Bible
- 230 – Christianity
- 240 – Christian Practice & Observance
- 250 – Christian Orders & Local Churches
- 260 – Social & Ecclesiastical Theology
- 270 – History of Christianity
- 280 – Christian Denominations
- 290 – Other Religions

Each of these divisions is subdivided further of course: the 280s (Christian Denominations), for example, include works on the Early Church (281), Roman Catholicism (282), Anglicanism (283), Methodism (287), and so on.

When you’re learning the library with your students, be sure they understand that any library collection that uses the Dewey Decimal Classification will be arranged in the same way: the numbers run from 000 to 999 in every Dewey-based library, so if you’re interested in, say, astronomy, you’ll find it in the 520s in both the small-town library near you and in the big-city library across the country.

Mastering these library basics will help your students become independent life-long learners and will ensure that they’ll feel right at home in any library they visit.

What delightful decimals and textual treasures have you found in your library lately? 😊

❡ Make it a tradition: Why not spend a few minutes during your first library visit each month and devise a little Dewey tradition of your own. Read the title page of one book in the 200s, one in the 210s, one in the 220s, one in the 230s, and so on. Find the very first book in the class (the lowest 200) and the very last book in the class (the highest 299). Find the thinnest book and the thickest book in each class. Make a list of your five favorite numbers in each class. If you follow a simple pattern like this over the course of the year you’ll be surprised how much information your students will absorb without even realizing it. 📚

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

❡ Find all our Books & Libraries posts on Facebook at #RHlibraries.

🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 2 December 2018

2 December 2018 by Bob O'Hara

✦ This is the first full week of ORION TERM in the River Houses (riverhouses.org/blog/2018-orion-term).

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Vermont, and our COUNTRIES are El Salvador 🇸🇻, Equatorial Guinea 🇬🇶, Eritrea 🇪🇷, and Estonia 🇪🇪. (Our separate Sunday States & Countries post went up just a few minutes ago.)

🌘 THE MOON at the beginning of this week is a waning crescent — a good time for stargazing! Track the moon’s phases each month at timeanddate.com, and dial up this week’s constellations with your River Houses star atlas (riverhouses.org/books).

🗓 TODAY (Sunday, 2 December) — Today is the 336th day of 2018; there are 29 days remaining in the year. Learn more about different kinds of modern and historical calendars on pages 351–357 in your River Houses almanac (riverhouses.org/books). ⬩ The Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, the oldest Jewish synagogue building in the United States, was dedicated on this day in 1763. ⬩ And, the annual Jewish festival of Hanukkah, commemorating the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 165 B.C., begins tonight at sundown.

MONDAY (3 December) — Today is the birthday of Gilbert Stuart (1755–1828), the famous portrait-painter of early America. ⬩ It’s also the birthday of Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), author of The Heart of Darkness and other staples of English literature courses worldwide.

TUESDAY (4 December) — Since this is the first Tuesday of the month, we’ll invite you today to browse a new Dewey Decimal class with your students on your next visit to your local library. This month: Class 200 (Religion).

WEDNESDAY (5 December) — On this day in 1775, in one of the great engineering feats of the American Revolution, Henry Knox began transporting sixty tons of artillery captured from the British at Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain all the way to Boston, a journey of 300 miles through snow-filled forests and over frozen swamps and rivers. ⬩ Today is also the birthday of the great German physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976), the father of quantum mechanics.

THURSDAY (6 December) — Today is the birthday of the great American songwriter Ira Gershwin (1896–1983). ⬩ Everglades National Park in Florida was dedicated by President Harry Truman on this day in 1947.

FRIDAY (7 December) — On this day in 1787, Delaware became the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution. ⬩ And on this day in 1941, “a date which will live in infamy,” the Imperial Japanese Navy launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, bringing the United States into World War II. ⬩ Since this is the first Friday of the month, we’ll also post our regular monthly preview today of some of the astronomical events you and your homeschool students can be on the lookout for over the next few weeks.

SATURDAY (8 December) — On this day in 1660, a female actor (her identity is disputed) appeared on the English stage for the first time, playing the role of Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello. ⬩ Our homeschool poem-of-the-week for second week of December is Emily Dickinson’s “He ate and drank the precious words,” in honor of Dickinson’s upcoming birthday on the 10th. Print your own River Houses poetry calendar at riverhouses.org/calendars and follow along with us throughout the year.

SUNDAY (9 December) — Today is the birthday of the great English poet and political revolutionary John Milton (1608–1674), one of the towering figures in the history of the English language. ⬩ And on this day in 1965, the much-loved special “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” with music by Vince Guaraldi, premiered on CBS television.

🥂 YOUR WEEKLY TOAST: “May those who fall by misfortune be lifted up by the hand of friendship.”

🌎 EVERYTHING FLOWS: Estonia is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the beautiful Pärnu River, one of Estonia’s longest rivers. You can chart its course in your River Houses atlas (riverhouses.org/books), and you can read more about it in the Pärnu River entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

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

❡ Find all our weekly “Quick Freshes” posts on Facebook at #RHfreshes.

🇺🇸 SUNDAY STATES: Vermont, El Salvador, Estonia, and More 🌎

2 December 2018 by Bob O'Hara

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.

🇺🇸
Vermont State Quarter
VERMONT (the 14th state, 4 March 1791) — The Green Mountain State. Capital: Montpelier. Vermont can be found on page 588 in your almanac and on plates 44 and 142 in your atlas. Name origin: “From French words vert (green) and mont (mountain). The Green Mountains were said to have been named by Samuel de Champlain. When the state was formed in 1777, Dr. Thomas Young suggested combining vert and mont” (almanac page 423). State bird: Hermit Thrush (bird guide page 410). Website: www.vermont.gov.

This week’s countries, with their official websites, are:

🇸🇻 EL SLAVADOR in Central America. Population: 6,172,011. Capital: San Salvador. Website: www.presidencia.gob.sv (in Spanish).
🇬🇶 EQUATORIAL GUINEA in western Africa. Population: 778,358. Capital: Malabo. Website: www.guineaecuatorialpress.com (in English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese).
🇪🇷 ERITREA in eastern Africa. Population: 5,918,919. Capital: Asmara. Website: www.shabait.com (in English).
🇪🇪 ESTONIA in eastern Europe. Population: 1,251,581. Capital: Tallinn. Website: www.eesti.ee (in English, Estonian, and Russian).

What wondrous geographical discoveries have you made in your homeschool lately? 😊

❡ Find all our weekly States & Countries posts on Facebook at #RHstates.

🎵 HOLIDAY MUSIC MONTH is Here: Good Morrow, Masters All!

1 December 2018 by Bob O'Hara

It’s just past three o’clock, and it’s cold and frosty this morning in the Nashua River valley. Good morrow, home school-masters and school-mistresses all!

December is Holiday Music Month in the River Houses, and throughout the month we’ll be sharing an assortment of our seasonal favorites — classical and modern, sacred and secular, serious and silly — along with a smattering of educational notes that will help you teach little lessons all along the way.

Our sprightly inaugural carol for the month, like many traditional pieces of Christmas music, has quite a few different roots. The tune and the non-holiday refrain — Past three o’clock … Good morrow, masters all! — have been traced to at least the 1600s, while the specific Christmas verses that tell the Biblical story of the Nativity were composed in the early twentieth century by George Ratcliffe Woodward (1848–1934). (Homeschool lesson: although some pieces of music, like some works of literature, are the product of a single author writing at a single time, others are composite works that have grown and changed in different ways over many generations, as we see with true folk songs, ancient epics, and many traditional Christmas carols.)

[The Lincoln Waits] — The Lincoln (U.K.) Waits today. (Image: townwaits.org.uk.)

The refrain of “Past Three O’Clock” is based on the night-time call of the waits — the traditional night-watchmen/town-musicians that existed in many English towns as far back as the Middle Ages. The waits would walk the town at night calling or piping out the hour, and their role grew to include minstrelsy and performances at local musical events. The International Guild of Town Pipers (townwaits.org.uk) keeps alive the tradition of the waits today.

Past three o’clock,
And a cold frosty morning,
Past three o’clock;
Good morrow, masters all!

Born is a Baby,
Gentle as may be,
Son of the eternal
Father supernal. (Refrain.)

Seraph quire singeth,
Angel bell ringeth;
Hark how they rime it,
Time it and chime it. (Refrain.)

Mid-earth rejoices
Hearing such voices
Ne’ertofore so well
Carolling Nowell. (Refrain.)

Hinds o’er the pearly,
Dewy lawn early
Seek the high Stranger
Laid in the manger. (Refrain.)

Cheese from the dairy
Bring they for Mary
And, not for money,
Butter and honey. (Refrain.)

Light out of star-land
Leadeth from far land
Princes, to meet him,
Worship and greet him. (Refrain.)

Myrrh from full coffer,
Incense they offer;
Nor is the golden
Nugget withholden. (Refrain.)

Thus they: I pray you,
Up, sirs, nor stay you
Till ye confess him
Likewise and bless him. (Refrain.)

If you want to put together your own homeschool performance of “Past Three O’Clock” this Christmas season, you can find the sheet music at hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com. With practice and luck, you might sound as good as the talented Girl Choir of South Florida in this performance from 2011:

What musical discoveries will you be making in your homeschool this month? 😊

❡ Find all our Arts & Music posts on Facebook at #RHartists.

🗓 ORION TERM BEGINS

1 December 2018 by Bob O'Hara

Today marks the beginning of our Winter Term — Orion Term — here in the River Houses. Orion Term runs from December through February.

We put great stock in the educational value of the calendar in the River Houses. The calendar is the framework on which we human beings hang a great many of the facts we know about the world: historical events, natural phenomena, personal reminiscences, the seasons, the sun and moon, the planets, the stars. A key part of every student’s educational development is the development of “calendar sense” — a sense of time and history.

Our annual calendar for the River Houses divides the homeschool year into four three-month terms (quarters) that roughly correspond to the seasons, and we have named these terms after prominent seasonal constellations of the northern hemisphere:

✦ Fall or Cygnus Term (September–November)
✦ Winter or Orion Term (December–February)
✦ Spring or Leo Term (March–May)
✦ Summer or Hercules Term (June–August)

This calendrical division is a new and an open-ended idea that we think has a great deal of potential. We’re looking forward to its development as time goes on.

As you think about your own homeschool year, think about how different parts of it — curricular, co-curricular, social, or recreational — might be informally arranged into these four terms. You could have different astronomical decorating themes in your classroom, for example, or you could schedule a regular trip to a particularly special place at the beginning of each term to see how the seasons change. You could group your curricular work by term, or set goals for your students to meet each term, or have your students write achievement reports at each term’s end. With a little imagination you may be able to come up with a clever and comfortable arrangement and a new way to think about the structure of your educational year.

[The constellation Orion] — The constellation Orion, the Great Hunter of the Heavens, making his nightly passage to the western horizon. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

Today is the first day of Orion Term (December–February), named for the Great Hunter of the Heavens who is rising now in the east each evening about 8:00 p.m. and who will be passing overhead throughout the winter.

If you want to make a special astronomical study this term, your River Houses reference library (riverhouses.org/books) includes a handy set of sky maps and a planisphere that will show you the location of Orion and its most prominent stars:

Orion is generally considered to be the most beautiful and imposing constellation in the heavens. It is easily recognized; the four bright stars forming a large rectangle and the three second magnitude stars, equally spaced and forming a straight line (the Belt of Orion) enclosed by the rectangle, are a delight to the eye. No other constellation has so many bright stars. Compare the colors of Betelgeuse, a giant red star, and Rigel, a brilliant blue-white star. Rigel has a magnitude of 0.18 and is the 7th brightest star in the sky. Betelgeuse has a magnitude of 0.45 and ranks 10th in brightness. Orion is in a portion of the sky that contains seven of the 30 brightest stars in the heavens; these are to be found in Orion, Auriga, Gemini, Taurus, Canis Major and Canis Minor. There are two famous nebulae in Orion; one, the [Great] Orion Nebula, is visible to the naked eye. It is the prototype of the diffuse nebulae; a great cloud of cosmic dust and gases many light years in diameter and 1,500 light years away. θ [theta] Orionis marks the center of the Great Nebula; viewed through binoculars, the star seems to be enveloped in a hazy field that marks the nebula’s presence. Even in a small telescope, the Great Nebula is an awe-inspiring sight. The other famous nebula is the so-called ‘Horse’s Head’ Nebula, a dark nebula silhouetted against a glowing cloud of cosmic dust in the shape of a horse’s head. This remarkable object is not visible to the naked eye; long photographic exposures are required to show its details. The darkness of this cosmic cloud is due to the fact that there are no nearby stars to illuminate it. σ [sigma], θ [theta], and ι [iota] Orionis mark the Sword of Orion. δ [delta] Orionis, the northernmost star in the Belt of Orion, lies almost exactly on the celestial equator. The Belt stars serve as valuable pointers; the line through them extended to the southeast points to Sirius and to the northwest, to Aldebaran in Taurus. (Celestron Sky Maps, pages 18–19)

Why not spend a little time out after dark this term with your students and locate the Great Hunter as he makes his nightly passage to the west. Once you learn to spot him, you’ll have a friend for life.

[Chart of the constellation Orion] — Star chart of the constellation Orion. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

What educational adventures do you have planned for this Orion Term? 😊

❡ Find all our calendrical posts on Facebook at #RHcalendars.

🐦 WINTER BIRD-FEEDING SEASON is Here!

30 November 2018 by Bob O'Hara

Friday is Natural History Day in the River Houses, and with winter approaching, this is the right time to start thinking about feeding birds in your backyard. It’s one of the simplest and most educational homeschool activities you can do during the winter season.

Whether you’re a beginning backyard birder or an old hand, the resource you’ll want to explore is Project FeederWatch from Cornell University:

📍PROJECT FEEDERWATCH, sponsored by Cornell University (feederwatch.org)

They even have a special educational guide for homeschoolers:

📍PROJECT FEEDERWATCH for Homeschoolers (birdsleuth.org)

“The Homeschooler’s Guide to Project FeederWatch is a free eight-page document that contains ideas for families participating in Project FeederWatch. These lesson-starters will help you teach multiple subjects using birds and will inspire creative ideas for science-related art projects, designing and building feeders, strengthening math skills, and assisting children in conducting a research project.”

If you’re in the market for a feeder you’ll find that there are many different types available. Here are some selections at Amazon.com that you can explore — browse around and find one or two that would fit well in your own backyard setting:

📍TUBE/HOPPER-TYPE FEEDERS, favored by chickadees, finches, and sparrows (amzn.to/2KHWpUg)

📍PLATFORM FEEDERS, favored by ground-loving birds such as cardinals (amzn.to/2PaJafw)

📍SUET FEEDERS, favored by woodpeckers and nuthatches (amzn.to/2Q6sQSn)

📍WINDOW FEEDERS, for close-up views (amzn.to/2P9Bqu4)

If your students watch carefully over the course of the winter, they will discover that different bird species exhibit different behaviors: chickadees will generally pick up a single seed and fly away with it; winter finches, by contrast, will usually perch and keep eating until something scares them away. Cardinals will generally choose a flat surface to feed on if one is available, while finches will happily feed from slender perches well off the ground. Woodpeckers won’t be attracted to your seed offerings, but they will readily come to a suet feeder.

Set up a homeschool bird feeder or two this winter, and see how many educational discoveries you can make in your own backyard. 😊

❡ Books in the running brooks: Our River Houses 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. 🦉

❡ 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 simple or as complex 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 (eBird.org), also 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. 🐦

❡ Find all our Birds & Natural History posts on Facebook at #RHnature.

🖋 LOUISA MAY ALCOTT Gets a Visit From Horace the River Otter

29 November 2018 by Bob O'Hara

Today is the birthday of the American writer Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888), author of the enduringly popular young-adult novel Little Women (1868). If you have Alcott fans in your homeschool, they should know that they are not alone. Our mascot, Horace the River Otter, is also an Alcott fan and recently paid his respects at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, where Louisa and her family are buried.

Our mascot, Horace the River Otter, visits the grave of Louisa May Alcott in Concord, Massachusetts.

Old cemeteries are wonderful places to explore and learn about history and culture. The Find-A-Grave website (findagrave.com) will help you locate the final resting places of all kinds of notable people — writers, artists, scientists, politicians — as well as millions of other regular folks all around the world. If your students have a favorite historical figure that they like to read about, why not look that person up on Find-A-Grave and add some additional historical perspective to their understanding.

What literary anniversaries will you be marking in your homeschool this week? 😊

❡ Find all our Language & Literature posts on Facebook at #RHwords.

📚 LIBRARY TUESDAY: Discovering William Blake (1757–1827)

27 November 2018 by Bob O'Hara

It’s Books & Libraries Day at the River Houses, and since this Wednesday is the birthday of the great poet and artist William Blake (1757–1827), why not spend a few library minutes this week introducing your homescholars to his name and his work.

We like to use the annual calendar as a tool for “teaching with-out the curriculum” — for casually introducing names, dates, ideas, images, and language that may not be part of your formal homeschool course of study (if you have one), but that are culturally and historically important for students to know.

This doesn’t require any special planning. Our regular “Quick Freshes” postings include an array of interesting events each week, and all you have to do is pick one, take a moment to look it up online or on your next local library visit, and then share a picture or a few paragraphs with your students — and with that, your little lesson is done.

This week, you can do that with William Blake, one of the most influential figures in English literary history. His poem “The Tyger” is one of the most widely anthologized poems in the language, and his visual style is unmistakable. His life was unorthodox and turbulent — he suffered from hallucinations and today would almost certainly be diagnosed with some form of mental illness — but it was that turbulence that drove his creativity.

Your local library will certainly have copies of many of Blake’s works on its shelves, and maybe even a facsimile edition of one of his rare illustrated volumes that you can browse with your students. (Blake’s best known works were not printed in type in the conventional way; he instead engraved the text and illustrations on copper plates, and then the printed pages were all colored by hand.)

“The Tyger,” From William Blake’s Songs of Experience (1794). (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

Here are some original examples of Blake’s works from the rare book collections at the Library of Congress — you’ll need a large screen to appreciate them:

📚 William Blake at the Library of Congress (www.loc.gov)

Your local library will have others for you to explore, and if Blake’s fearful symmetry happens to catch your imagination, they will be able to order even more volumes for you via interlibrary loan.

What treasures have you discovered in your library lately? 😊

❡ Explore more: For a brief overview of the international artistic and philosophical movement known as Romanticism, including another engraved illustration from Blake’s Songs of Experience, turn to pages 338–339 in your recommended River Houses history encyclopedia (riverhouses.org/books).

❡ Learning the library: Have you discovered all the libraries in your local area? There may be more than you realize! The WorldCat Library Finder (worldcat.org/libraries) will point you to all the library collections near you — public and private, large and small — and the WorldCat catalog itself (worldcat.org) will help you locate the closest copy of almost any book in the world. 😊

❡ Find all our Books & Libraries posts on Facebook at #RHlibraries.

🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 25 November 2018

25 November 2018 by Bob O'Hara

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Rhode Island, and our COUNTRIES are Dominica 🇩🇲, the Dominican Republic 🇩🇴, Ecuador 🇪🇨, and Egypt 🇪🇬. (Our separate Sunday States & Countries post went up just a few minutes ago.)

🌖 THE MOON at the beginning of this week is gibbous and waning — an increasingly good time for stargazing. Track the moon’s phases each month at timeanddate.com, and dial up this week’s constellations with your River Houses star atlas (riverhouses.org/books).

🗓 TODAY (Sunday, 25 November) — Today is the 329th day of 2018; there are 36 days remaining in the year. Learn more about different kinds of modern and historical calendars on pages 351–357 in your River Houses almanac (riverhouses.org/books). ⬩ Today also is the birthday of the great Scottish-American businessman and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), who planted beautiful public libraries all around the world.

MONDAY (26 November) — The first lighthouse on the deadly Eddystone rocks off the southwest coast of England was destroyed on the night of 26/27 November in the Great Storm of 1703. No trace of the six occupants of the lighthouse was ever found. ⬩ The classic movie Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, premiered on this day in 1942. ⬩ And today is the birthday of Charles M. Schulz (1922–2000), creator of the beloved Peanuts comic strip.

TUESDAY (27 November) — Today is the birthday of the Swedish astronomer and physicist Anders Celsius (1701–1744), a man of degrees. ⬩ The first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was held in New York City on this day in 1924.

WEDNESDAY (28 November) — Today is (probably) the birthday of the Puritan preacher and theologian John Bunyan (1628–1688), author of The Pilgrim’s Progress, the second most widely printed book in world history (after the Bible). ⬩ Today is also the birthday of the great English mystical poet William Blake (1757–1827). ⬩ And on this day in 1972, the first successful arcade video game, Pong, was released. (Does anyone remember arcade games?)

THURSDAY (29 November) — Today is the birthday of the American novelist Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888), author of Little Women and Little Men.

FRIDAY (30 November) — Today is the birthday of another American novelist, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain (1835–1910). ⬩ It’s also the birthday of British statesman and Nobel laureate Winston Churchill (1874–1965). 🌠 And on this day in 1954, a meteorite smashed through the roof of a house in Sylacauga, Alabama, and struck a woman named Ann Hodges, who was taking a nap. The Sylacauga meteorite, as it is now called, is the only known meteorite in the Western Hemisphere ever to have struck a person. (Hodges was bruised, but sustained no permanent injuries.)

SATURDAY (1 December) — Today is the beginning of Orion Term in the River Houses. ⬩ And December in the River Houses is Holiday Music Month! 🎵 Keep your eyes and ears open for many musical delights throughout the month. ⬩ Our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the first week of December is “R.L.S.,” a gem-like homage to Robert Louis Stevenson written by A.E. Housman (1859–1936). Print your own River Houses poetry calendar at riverhouses.org/calendars and follow along with us throughout the year. ⬩ On this day in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, civil rights activist Rosa Parks (1913–2005) was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man, an event that sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and the subsequent growth of the American civil rights movement.

SUNDAY (2 December) — The Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, the oldest Jewish synagogue building in the United States, was dedicated on this day in 1763.

🥂 YOUR WEEKLY TOAST: “May we always see our neighbor’s distress with an eye of compassion.”

🌎 EVERYTHING FLOWS: Egypt is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the great Nile, the mother of human civilization. You can chart its course in your River Houses atlas (riverhouses.org/books), and you can read more about it in the Nile River entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

The fertile Nile valley and the lush Nile delta as seen from space. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

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

❡ Find all our weekly “Quick Freshes” posts on Facebook at #RHfreshes.

🇺🇸 SUNDAY STATES: Rhode Island, Dominica, Egypt, and More 🌎

25 November 2018 by Bob O'Hara

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.

🇺🇸
Rhode Island State Quarter
RHODE ISLAND (the 13th state, 29 May 1790) — The Ocean State. Capital: Providence. Rhode Island can be found on page 584 in your almanac and on plates 44 and 142 in your atlas. Name origin: “Origin unknown. One theory notes that Giovanni de Verrazano recorded observing an island about the size of the Greek island of Rhodes in 1524. Another theory is that Dutch explorer Adriaen Block named the state Roode Eylandt for its red clay” (almanac page 423). State bird: Rhode Island Red Hen. Website: www.ri.gov.

❡ Little lessons: You can teach a hundred little lessons with the 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. (That’s won’t work for Rhode Island; can you tell why?) 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 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 world of new geographical and historical information. 😊

This week’s countries, with their official websites, are:

🇩🇲 DOMINICA in the West Indies. Population: 73,897. Capital: Roseau. Website: dominica.gov.dm (in English).
🇩🇴 THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC in the West Indies. Population: 10,734,247. Capital: Santo Domingo. Website: presidencia.gob.do (in Spanish).
🇪🇨 ECUADOR in northwestern South America. Population: 16,290,913. Capital: Quito. Website: www.presidencia.gob.ec (in Spanish).
🇪🇬 EGYPT in northeastern Africa. Population: 97,041,072. Capital: Cairo. Website: eip.gov.eg (in Arabic and English).

What wondrous geographical discoveries have you made in your homeschool lately? 😊

❡ Find all our weekly States & Countries posts on Facebook at #RHstates.

🌕 LUNAR SOCIETY REPORT: Research Projects for Homeschool Students

23 November 2018 by Bob O'Hara

Tonight is the night of the full moon, and that means it’s time for a report from the Lunar Society of the River Houses.

The Lunar Society is one of our big and wonderful plans to encourage homeschoolers to participate in real online research projects and share their results with other homeschool families. Here’s an outline of the idea, along with a list of great projects that homeschool students (and their parents) can join and contribute to, from history to natural history to galactic exploration:

🌕 The Lunar Society of the River Houses (riverhouses.org/lunar-society)

Browse through that project list and find one that would be a good fit for your family. Before you know it, your students will be learning a host of valuable skills, and your little home academy will be on its way to becoming a research powerhouse. 🔬 🔭 🖥 🦋 🔍 ⚗️ 📖 🌲 😊

Over time, it’s my hope that these monthly reports about the Lunar Society will evolve into something like a forum where homeschoolers participating in online research can share their achievements. As a simple example, here’s my own personal report for the past month on the two main projects I participate in, eBird and SETI@Home:

On the eBird site (eBird.org), sponsored by Cornell University, I’ve been tracking the birds in a small riverside park near me (ebird.org/hotspot/L6926932) and over the past month I’ve added 30 new checklists (daily observation reports), bringing my eBird total to 448. Here’s today’s list as an example: ebird.org/view/checklist/S50161311. When all the checklists are combined you can really see the distribution and migration chart for the year develop, with fall migration and spring migration pulses visible for a number of local species.

Bird records for Riverfront Park in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, as compiled by eBird. You can see the fall migration appearance of White-crowned and White-throated Sparrows, two species that are generally absent at other times of year. Baltimore Orioles and Red-winged Blackbirds, by contrast, appear only sporadically in the spring.

You can start keeping a similar list for a location near you — your backyard, or a local park or other natural area. Just pay a visit to the eBird site (ebird.org) and start exploring.

The SETI@Home project (setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu), sponsored by the University of California, uses idle time on your computer to perform complex calculations on radio telescope data, looking for extraterrestrial signals. (Really!) I’ve been participating in this project with my computers for a long time and I recently created a River Houses team page for future use (setiathome.berkeley.edu/team_display.php?teamid=208851). Once your computer is signed up to participate, you can print a “certificate of computation” that shows how much data you’ve analyzed.

I’m up to 21,604 “cobblestones” (units) of contributed computation so far. You can participate and get a regular certificate of your own — it would be just the thing for your homeschool bulletin board. 😊

The Internet provides exceptional opportunities for homeschool students to participate in real research projects like these in a variety of scientific and scholarly fields, something that would have been impossible only a few years ago. Pay a visit to our Lunar Society page (riverhouses.org/lunar-society) to see many more projects that your family can join.

What scholarly and scientific discoveries have you made in your homeschool this month? 😊

❡ Calling all photographers: If you’ve got a budding photographer in your homeschool, one group project you can participate in is the Wikimedia Commons Photo Challenge. Different themes are chosen each month; this month’s themes are “Bones” and “Measurements.” Just sign up and follow the instructions to submit your own entries. Once you’re a registered participant you can also vote for each month’s winners. Check the page regularly to find out about additional upcoming themes. 😊 📸

❡ Find all our Lunar Society research-project posts on Facebook at #RHlunar.

🎵 WELCOME HOME (for Native American Heritage Day)

23 November 2018 by Bob O'Hara

Today is Native American Heritage Day, an official holiday enacted by Congress in 2008 “to honor the achievements and contributions of Native Americans to the United States.” In celebration of the occasion, why not spend a few homeschool minutes today with the wonderful celebratory song “Welcome Home” by Cherokee singer-songwriter Michael Jacobs. It’s just the thing for a big family weekend:

Michael Jacobs is a regular performer at colleges and music festivals across the country. You can learn more about him and hear more of his music at his professional website:

📍 Michael Jacobs Music (www.michaeljacobsmusic.com)

What musical discoveries have you made in your homeschool this week? 😊

❡ Find all our Arts & Music posts on Facebook at #RHartists.

🎵 THE ROAD HOME for Thanksgiving

22 November 2018 by Bob O'Hara

On this homeschool Thanksgiving Day, why not make a beautiful modern classic from American composter Stephen Paulus (1949–2014) part of the peaceful background for your little family academy. It’s scored (I like to say) for a chorus of adult children and their mother, all making their way home for Thanksgiving. This magnificent performance is from the Dale Warland Singers, for whom the work was commissioned. The adult children’s voices begin, and the maternal voice comes in at 2:20:

“The Road Home” has a wonderfully complex history, not unlike the history of many Christmas carols. The music is Paulus’ adaptation of an old hymn tune called “Prospect” that appeared in shape-note collection Southern Harmony in 1835. In Southern Harmony it was attributed to an otherwise unknown composer named Graham and was paired with verses by Isaac Watts. In 1925, Henry Richard McFadyen (1877–1964) wrote another set of verses for the tune; this combination, “The Lone, Wild Bird,” has recently been the subject of a beautiful arrangement by American composer Frank Glass. In 2004, in response to a commission from the Dale Warland Singers, Stephen Paulus returned to the original tune “Prospect,” devised a new choral adaptation, and paired it with another new set of lyrics, “The Road Home,” by his frequent collaborator Michael Dennis Browne:

Tell me, where is the road I can call my own,
That I left, that I lost so long ago?
All these years I have wandered,
Oh when will I know
There’s a way, there’s a road that will lead me home.

After wind, after rain, when the dark is done,
As I wake from a dream in the gold of day,
Through the air there’s a calling from far away
There’s a voice I can hear that will lead me home.

Rise, up, follow me, come away, is the call,
With love in your heart as the only song;
There is no such beauty as where you belong.
Rise up, follow me, I will lead you home.

And that’s how we came to have this lovely work, which is well on its way to becoming an American (and worldwide) choral classic. But you can study all that next week. Today, just listen and enjoy. 😊 Happy Thanksgiving!