The River Houses Homeschool Network

🏡 WELCOME! (Pinned Post)

26 October 2019 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.) 😊

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). 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. Take a look around and make yourself at home! 😊

🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 15 December 2019

15 December 2019 by Bob O'Hara

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-12-15

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 for the entire year.

🎵 🎄 December is Holiday Music Month in the River Houses, and throughout the month we continue to share an assortment of seasonal favorites — classical and modern, sacred and secular, serious and silly — along with educational notes that will help you teach little musical homeschool lessons all along the way.

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Tennessee, and our COUNTRIES are France 🇫🇷, Gabon 🇬🇦, The Gambia 🇬🇲, and Georgia 🇬🇪. (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 waning — 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).

🗓 TODAY, Sunday (15 December 2019) — Today is the 349th day of 2019; there are 16 days remaining in the year. Learn more about different kinds of modern and historical calendars on pages 358–364 in your River Houses almanac (riverhouses.org/books). 📚 The famous film Gone With the Wind, starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, premiered in Atlanta, Georgia, on this day in 1939. 🎬 On this day in 1970, the Soviet spacecraft Venera 7 made the first-ever soft landing on another planet (Venus). 🚀 And our homeschool poem-of-the-week for third week of December, as the winter solstice approaches, is Robert Frost’s “Reluctance,” for autumn’s end. 🍂 Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us throughout the year. 🖋

Monday (16 December 2019) — It’s Beethoven’s birthday! (Well, probably.) 🎵 It’s also the birthday of the English novelist Jane Austen (1775–1817). 🖋 And on this day in 1773, a group of disgruntled Bostonians dumped hundreds of pounds of tea into Boston Harbor, and “the Boston Tea Party” has been a part of American history ever since. ☕️

Tuesday (17 December 2019) — Today is the birthday of the American poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892). 🖋 And on this day in 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first successful heavier-than-air flight in their prototype airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina — and the rest is aviation history. ✈️

Wednesday (18 December 2019) — The great physicist and Nobel laureate J. J. Thompson, the discoverer of the electron, was born on this day in 1856. ⚛️

Thursday (19 December 2019) — “These are the times that try men’s souls”: the first of a series of pamphlets by Thomas Paine called “The American Crisis” was published on this this day in 1776 in Philadelphia. 🇺🇸 And today is also the birthday of the pioneering African-American historian Carter G. Woodson (1875–1950). 🔎

Friday (20 December 2019) — Today is the birthday of the American physicist Robert J. Van de Graaff (1901–1967), known for making people’s hair stand on end. ⚡️ The storied Christmas movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” premiered on this day in 1946 in New York City. 📽 And our Friday Bird Families post this week will continue our introduction to the Gulls, Terns, and Skimmers. (It’s a big group!) Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us throughout the year. 🦅

Saturday (21 December 2019) — Happy First Day of Winter! ❄️ Today is the December Solstice, known as the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere and the summer solstice in the southern hemisphere (where today is the first day of summer). 🗓 On this day in 1620, the Mayflower Pilgrims came ashore at what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts (and they maybe stepped on Plymouth Rock, or maybe didn’t). ⚓️ And on this day in 1913, the first modern crossword puzzle was published in the New York World newspaper. 📰

Sunday (22 December 2019) — Today is the birthday of the great Italian opera composer Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924). 🎼 And the annual Jewish festival of Hanukkah, commemorating the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 165 B.C., begins tonight at sundown. 🕎

🥂 OUR TOAST THIS WEEK is our traditional annual offering for the winter solstice: “To cold weather and warm hearts.”

❡ 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: Gabon in western Africa is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Ogooué River, Gabon’s principal river and one of the largest rivers in Africa. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas (riverhouses.org/books), and you can read more about it in the Ogooué River entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

The Ogooué River in Gabon. (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: Tennessee, France, Georgia, and More

15 December 2019 by Bob O'Hara

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-tennessee

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 429), so this week’s state is:

🇺🇸
Tennessee State Bird and Flower
TENNESSEE (the 16th state, 1 June 1796) — The Volunteer State. Capital: Nashville. Tennessee can be found on page 585 in your almanac and on plates 42 and 142 in your atlas. Name origin: “Tanasi was the name of Cherokee villages on the Little Tennessee River. From 1784 to 1788, this was the State of Franklin, or Frankland” (almanac page 430). State bird: Northern Mockingbird (bird guide page 416). Website: www.tn.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:

🇫🇷 FRANCE in western Europe. Population: 67,364,357. Capital: Paris. Government: Semi-presidential republic. Website: www.gouvernement.fr (in French and English).
🇬🇦 GABON in western Africa. Population: 2,119,036. Capital: Libreville. Government: Presidential republic. Website: www.gouvernement.ga (in French).
🇬🇲 THE GAMBIA in western Africa. Population: 2,092,731. Capital: Banjul. Government: Presidential republic. Website: statehouse.gov.gm (in English).
🇬🇪 GEORGIA in southwestern Asia. Population: 4,926,087. Capital: Tblisi. Government: Semi-presidential republic. Website: www.gov.ge (in Georgian, Russian, and 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 geographical explorations will you be making in your homeschool this Orion 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. 🇺🇸 🌎

🎵 🎄 HOLIDAY MUSIC MONTH: O Little Town of Bethlehem

14 December 2019 by Bob O'Hara

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-bethlehem

December is Holiday Music Month in the River Houses, and throughout the month we’re sharing an assortment of seasonal favorites in a great variety of styles and genres — classical and modern, sacred and secular, serious and silly — along with (of course) a collection of educational notes that will help you teach little homeschool lessons all along the way.

One of the world’s most popular Christmas carols, “O Little Town of Bethlehem” is an American original in both words and music. Its popularity makes it a great piece to discuss with your students at this time of year in the context of musical styles and preferences. You can find dozens of versions online — which ones do your students like best? Have them listen to several and invite them to give reasoned explanations of their choices — that’s the way to help them develop a mature aesthetic sense.

Perhaps they’ll pick a traditional version from the velvet-voiced Nat King Cole (1919–1965):

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Or perhaps they’ll prefer to listen to just the tune alone, with no vocal accompaniment:

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Or maybe a soulful southern-style performance from Elvis Presley (1935–1977) will attract their attention:

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Or perhaps they’ll like a classical choral version with full orchestra, like this one from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, one of the most famous choral groups in the world:

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Or if that’s too loud, perhaps the softness of Canadian folksinger Sarah McLachlan (b. 1968) might be better:

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The ancient Romans had a famous saying, “De gustibus non disputandum est” — “In matters of taste, there can be no dispute.” You like Elvis, and I like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and that’s all there is to it. But even though there are no absolute rights and wrongs in matters of taste, there can certainly be reasons behind individual preferences, and those reasons are what you want your students to explore. Do you tend to prefer male voices or female voices? Do you tend to prefer faster performances or slower performances? Do you like simple arrangements or rich orchestral arrangements? By encouraging your students to think about the reasons for their aesthetic judgements you’ll help them develop intellectually, analytically, and in their own self-awareness.

And don’t forget to include a little history along the way. The text of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” was written for Christmas in 1868 by Phillips Brooks (1835–1893), the rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Philadelphia. Brooks asked his church organist, Lewis Redner (1831–1908), to write an accompanying tune, which he did (more or less the day before it was first performed). “Neither Mr. Brooks nor I ever thought the carol or the music to it would live beyond that Christmas of 1868.” And yet they both still do, more than a century and a half later, and all around the world.

What marvelous musical discoveries will you be making in your homeschool during this Holiday Music Month? 🤶 🎅 😊

❡ Musical memories: If you’d like to fill your homeschool with some beautiful background sounds this December, why not tune in to the 24-hour Holiday Channel from WQXR, the famous classical music station in New York City. “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 as background music almost all day. Won’t you join me? 📻 🎵 🎄

❡ Stay in the loop: This is one of our occasional posts on Homeschool Arts & Music. 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. 🗞

🌟 STAR BRIGHT: Aldebaran for December

14 December 2019 by Bob O'Hara

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-aldebaran

December is the first month of Orion Term in the River Houses, and as our monthly star calendar will tell you, December’s Great Star is Aldebaran, the brightest star in the constellation Taurus the Bull. Its formal designation is α Tauri — “alpha of Taurus.” Aldebaran is easily recognized in the small V-shaped cluster of stars called the Hyades, which outlines the face of the Bull. Taurus and Aldebaran are high in the east in the early evening now — washed out a bit by the bright moon this week, but as the month proceeds the moon will dim and slide out of the way and they’ll come into clearer view.

The constellation Taurus with its alpha star, **Aldebaran**, in the center. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

If you want to introduce your students to Aldebaran and Taurus, you can start with some basic astronomy and astronomical mythology from your backyard star guide (riverhouses.org/books):

“Taurus is a constellation of the zodiac at its northern peak in winter. It is easy to locate because Orion’s belt points right toward Aldebaran, the red eye of the bull. Farther to the northeast, the 444-light-years-distant Pleiades star cluster marks the animal’s shoulder. Also known as the Seven Sisters, it is one of the more easily identified deep-sky objects. A line traced from Betelgeuse (in Orion) [our February star] through Aldebaran will bring the dazzling group into view….

“Numerous myths accompany this constellation. The ancient Egyptians associate the Bull with Osiris, god of life and fertility, while in Greek mythology the Bull is one of Zeus’s disguises, used to capture Europa and bring her across the sea to the continent that bears her name. To some, Taurus represents the golden calf formed by the idling followers of Moses while he received the Ten Commandments.“ (Backyard Guide to the Night Sky, pages 266–267)

That’s plenty for beginning students — your little lesson is done. If you want to get more advanced, the Wikipedia page on Aldebaran is packed with additional information on everything from astrometry to cultural history.

“This cosmic vista stretches almost 20 degrees from top to bottom, across the dusty constellation Taurus. It begins at the Pleiades and ends at the Hyades, two star clusters recognized since antiquity in Earth’s night sky. At top, the compact Pleiades star cluster is about 400 light-years away…. At bottom, the V-shaped Hyades cluster [on its side, with the base of the V pointing right] looks more spread out in comparison and lies much closer, 150 light-years away. The Hyades cluster stars seem anchored by bright **Aldebaran**, a red giant star with a yellowish appearance. But Aldebaran actually lies only 65 light-years distant and just by chance along the line of sight to the Hyades cluster.” (Image: NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day website.)

Aldebaran is a classic red giant, more than 40 times the diameter of our sun and only about 65 light years distant — quite close in astronomical terms. It is somewhat older than the sun: a little more than six billion years old against the sun’s five billion.

Comparative sizes of Aldebaran and our sun. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

Because Aldebaran is so prominent and colorful in the northern hemisphere night sky, it has attracted the attention of careful observers from earliest times. Detailed studies of Aldebaran by Edmund Halley (of comet fame) helped to establish that the so-called fixed stars are in fact not fixed but rather exhibit “proper motion” — individual motion through space along different paths. (The term proper motion often confuses beginners. It doesn’t mean “correct” motion — the modern sense of the word “proper.” It means personal, individual motion — motion that is a property of the object itself.) From our point of view here on earth, Aldebaran has shifted its position against the distant background by about seven minutes of arc over the past 2000 years. The diameter of the moon is about thirty minutes of arc (half a degree), so over the past two millennia Aldebaran has moved by about a quarter of the diameter of the full moon.

The name Aldebaran means “the follower” in Arabic. (Astronomy and mathematics are the two fields that have borrowed the greatest number of words from Arabic.) The name was initially applied to the whole Hyades cluster and it refers to the way these stars trail along behind the Pleiades as they cross the winter sky.

Sometime this month, take your homeschool students out at dusk and introduce them to this giant ancient sun, and teach them its name, and so give them a new friend for life.

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

❡ Alpha and beta and gamma, oh my: Most of the principal stars within each constellation have both old vernacular names — Vega, Sirius, Arcturus, and so on — as well as more formal scientific designations. The German astronomer Johann Bayer (1572–1625) devised the formal system of star designations that is still in common use today. In Bayer’s system, the stars in each constellation, from brightest to dimmest, are assigned a lowercase letter of the Greek alphabet: α (alpha, brightest), β (beta, second brightest), γ (gamma, third brightest), δ (delta, fourth brightest), and so on. This letter designation is combined with the Latin name of the constellation in its possessive (genitive) form: Lyra becomes Lyrae (“of Lyra”), Canis Major becomes Canis Majoris (“of Canis Major”), and so on. The brightest star in the constellation Lyra (the star Vega) thus becomes α Lyrae (“alpha of Lyra”), the brightest star in Canis Major (the star Sirius) becomes α Canis Majoris (“alpha of Canis Major”), and so on, through all 24 Greek letters and all 88 constellations. How bright would you expect, say, the σ (sigma) star of Orion to be? Not very bright — it’s far down the alphabet — but σ Orionis happens to mark the top of Orion’s sword, so even though it’s not very bright it’s still notable and easy to locate on a dark night. ✨

❡ Star bright: The brightness of a star as we see it in our night sky is its magnitude — or more properly, its apparent magnitude. The scale of star magnitudes was developed long before modern measuring instruments were invented, so it can be a little bit confusing for beginners. Originally, the brightest stars in the sky were called “first magnitude” and the less-bright stars “second magnitude,” “third magnitude,” and so on, down to the dimmest stars visible to the naked eye, which were called “sixth magnitude.” In the nineteenth century the star Vega (our August star) was chosen as the standard brightness reference and its value on the magnitude scale was defined to be zero (0.0). Five steps in magnitude (from 0.0 to 5.0 or from 1.0 to 6.0) was defined to be a change in brightness of 100 times: a star 100 times dimmer than Vega (0.0) was defined to be a magnitude 5.0 star. Vega is not quite the brightest star is the sky, however, so the scale also had to be extended into negative numbers: Sirius (our March star), for example, is magnitude –1.5, about three times brighter than Vega (at 0.0). The planet Venus at its brightest is about magnitude –4.2; the full moon is about magnitude –12.9; the sun is magnitude –26.7. By contrast, the dimmest stars visible to the naked eye in a populated, light-polluted area are about magnitude 3.0; the dimmest stars visible under very dark conditions are about magnitude 6.5. The Hubble Space Telescope in orbit around the earth has photographed distant stars and galaxies below magnitude 30, the dimmest celestial objects humans have seen so far. 🔭

❡ Watchers of the skies: Teaching your students to recognize the constellations is one of the simplest and most enduring gifts you can give them. We recommend the handy Backyard Guide to the Night Sky (riverhouses.org/books) as a general family reference — it will help you identify all the northern hemisphere constellations and will point out many highlights, including the names and characteristics of the brightest stars. Your recommended world atlas also has beautiful maps of the whole northern and southern hemisphere night skies on plates 121–122. Why not find a dark-sky spot near you this month and spend some quality homeschool time beneath the starry vault. 🌌

❡ First star I see tonight: This is one of our regular Homeschool Astronomy posts featuring twelve of the most notable stars of the northern hemisphere night sky. Download and print your own copy of our River Houses Star Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us as we visit a different Great Star each month — and make each one of them a homeschool friend for life. 🌟

🦅 FRIDAY BIRD FAMILIES: Gulls, Terns, and Skimmers (I)

13 December 2019 by Horace the Otter 🦦

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-gulls-i

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 are the Gulls, Terns, and Skimmers (pages 180–213). Usually we cover one or two different families each week, but we’re spreading the Gulls, Terns, and Skimmers out over two weeks because there are so many of them: about 97 around the world and 50 in North America.

[See attached blog post for images and video]

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

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

“GULLS · TERNS · SKIMMERS — Family Laridae. A large, diverse family with strong wings and powerful flight. Some species are largely pelagic; others frequent coastal waters or inland lakes and wetlands. Gulls take from a little over a year to over three years or more to reach adult plumage; immatures are often variable and hard to identify. In general, male gulls are larger than females. Species: 97 World, 50 N.A. [North America]“

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. How many species? (97 worldwide.) Are there any near us? (50 species in North America, and the individual maps will give us more detail.) What are their distinctive features? (Strong fliers, often found near water, immatures variable in appearance, and so on.) (And “pelagic” 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 with your students each week and read the entry aloud, or have them study it and then narrate it back to you, explaining all the information it contains. This week, for the Gulls, Terns, and Skimmers, why not investigate the state bird of California: the California Gull (page 190).

[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 California Gull? (21 inches long with a 54-inch wingspan.) What is its scientific name? (Larus californicus.) 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 tell it apart from similar species? (The text and illustrations should answer all these questions.)

There are lots of good elementary biology lessons to teach here. For example: in many birds, the juveniles (immatures) look quite different from the adults, and in fact they may take several years to mature and may have a different appearance each year. (But note that in birds, unlike in humans, the juveniles are not smaller than the adults: once a bird is fledged — capable of flight — it has generally reached adult size, although it may not be reproductively mature for several more years, depending on the species.) As you browse though your bird guide, have your students take note of three basic kinds of variation that occur within species: geographical variation (from one part of the species’ range to another), sexual variation (between males and females), and age variation (between juveniles and adults).

[See attached blog post for images and video]

The Gulls, Terns, and Skimmers are a large family that we’re going to spread over two weeks. To start to get a sense of the diversity of the group, why not look at a second representative species this week — for example, the Bonaparte’s Gull (page 182), a beautiful black-headed species, much smaller than the California Gull, that frequents freshwater habitats all across North America.

[See attached blog post for images and video]

You can do little ten-minute lessons with any of the species in your bird guide that catch your interest. Pick a species that is near you, or one that looks striking, or one 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 hope also 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 will you be making in your homeschool this Orion 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. 🌎

❡ 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. 🐦 🦉 🦆 🦃 🦅

🎵 🎄 HOLIDAY MUSIC MONTH: Walla Walla, Wash., an’ Kalamazoo!

12 December 2019 by Bob O'Hara

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-kalamazoo

Out of a deep concern for your children’s intellectual development this month, I certainly hope you will introduce them to one of the most profound pieces of seasonal music ever written, to wit, Walt Kelly’s “Deck Us All With Boston Charlie”:

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December is Holiday Music Month in the River Houses, and throughout the month we’re sharing an assortment of seasonal favorites in a great variety of styles and genres — classical and modern, sacred and secular, serious and silly — along with (of course) a collection of educational notes that will help you teach little homeschool lessons all along the way.

Walt Kelly (1913–1973) was the creator of the long-running and much-loved “Pogo” newspaper comic stip. (“We have met the enemy, and he is us!”) And Walt was quite a poet, as “Deck Us All” will attest.

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., an’ Kalamazoo!
Nora’s freezin’ on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo!

Don’t we know archaic barrel
Lullaby Lilla Boy, Louisville Lou?
Trolley Molly don’t love Harold,
Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Polly wolly cracker ’n’ too-da-loo!
Donkey Bonny brays a carol,
Antelope Cantaloupe, ’lope with you!

Hunky Dory’s pop is lolly,
Gaggin’ on the wagon, Willy, folly go through!
Chollie’s collie barks at Barrow,
Harum scarum five alarm bung-a-loo!

Dunk us all in bowls of barley,
Hinky dinky dink an’ polly voo!
Chilly Filly’s name is Chollie,
Chollie Filly’s jolly chilly view halloo!

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Double-bubble, toyland trouble! Woof, woof, woof!
Tizzy seas on melon collie!
Dibble-dabble, scribble-scrabble! Goof, goof, goof!

This is one of the very best sing-a-long songs of the holiday season. For classroom credit in music this week (yeah, that’s the ticket!), why not have your students learn a verse or two and then entertain the whole family. Woof, woof, woof! ❄️ 🚋 🎄

What marvelous musical discoveries will you be making in your homeschool during this Holiday Music Month? 🤶 🎅 😊

🌕 RESEARCH PROJECTS for Homeschool Students – December 2019

12 December 2019 by Bob O'Hara

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-12-lunar

There’s a full moon tonight, so 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 long-term plans to encourage homeschoolers to participate in real online research projects and to share their results with other homeschool families.

Here’s an outline of the idea, along with a list of some of the great projects that homeschool students (and their parents) can join and contribute to, from history to geography to physics to natural history to mathematics to meteorology to literature to galactic exploration:

➢ The Lunar Society of the River Houses (riverhouses.org/lunar)

Browse through that project list and find one or two that would be a good fit for your family and a good match for your interests. Before you know it, your students will be learning a host of valuable skills and your little home academy will be well on its way to becoming an international 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 accomplishments.

As a simple example, here’s my own personal report for the past lunar month on the two types of projects I participate in: eBird monitoring of bird populations, and distributed computing research using the Berkeley open infrastructure application. You and your students can participate right now in these projects, and in many others too.

On the eBird website (eBird.org), sponsored by Cornell University, I’ve been tracking the birds in a small riverside park near me (eBird hotspot L6926932) and have so far contributed a total of 640 checklists (daily observation reports) for this locality — it’s a site that had never been documented before. When all the checklists are combined and charted automatically by eBird you can really get a sense of the seasonal distribution and migration patterns for the year — take a look:

➢ Seasonal Bar Chart for Nashua River Site L6926932 (ebird.org/barchart?r=L6926932)

And here’s a sample checklist so you can see what they look like:

➢ Sample Checklist for Nashua River Site L6926932

You can start keeping a similar eBird list for a location near you — your backyard, or a local park or other natural area. (Helping to track a public park or eBird “hotspot” will let you generate more useful results.) You can even add photos and sound recordings to your reports if you wish. Just pay a visit to the eBird website (ebird.org) and start exploring. (Note that the Great Backyard Bird Count, coming up in February, is an associated project and a great way to get started.)

Distributed computing projects use idle time on your computer to perform scientific calculations on various kinds of complex data. The most popular distributed computing projects run on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing platform (BOINC), and I contribute computer time (whenever my laptop is plugged in) to three of these: (1) the SETI@Home project, sponsored by the University of California, which searches for extraterrestrial intelligence (really!); (2) the Einstein@Home project, which studies neutron stars; and (3) the MilkyWay@Home project, which studies the history and structure of our galaxy.

I’ve created River Houses team pages for each of these projects (Einstein@Home team, MilkyWay@Home team, SETI@Home team). Once your computer is signed up to participate you can join one of these teams and also print “certificates of computation” that show how much data you’ve individually processed and how much your team has processed — they’re just the thing for your homeschool bulletin board. (And while they are running, both Einstein@Home and SETI@Home have cool screensavers that show you in real time what your computer is analyzing.) 📡

[For embedded images click to attached blog post]

And here’s another level of skill development for your high-school (or even advanced middle-school) students: once you’ve processed a few weeks or months of data, you can start graphing your contributions. Using Google Sheets, I’ve set up a simple chart of River Houses team results, and this is what it looks like:

[For embedded images click to attached blog post]

That’s just a simple graphing exercise — nothing particularly profound. It’s something that can be refined, developed, and expanded in the future. (And your students can develop their own individual charts as well.)

The Internet provides exceptional opportunities for homeschool students to participate in real research projects in many different scientific and scholarly fields, something that would have been impossible only a few years ago. The examples above are just a few that happen to interest me — pay a visit to our Lunar Society page to read about many more projects in a great variety of areas that you and your family can join.

What scholarly and scientific explorations will you be making in your homeschool this Orion Term? 😊

❡ The friends who made the future: You can learn more about the original Lunar Society of Birmingham in “The Lunar Men,” a fine short video from History West Midlands. 🌕

❡ Featured this month at Zooniverse: Looking for a good place to get started? Zooniverse.org is one of the biggest clearinghouses for citizen science projects, and each month on their front page they specially feature one of their many research projects you can join. This month’s featured project is the Galaxy Zoo Clump Scout — help to find regions where stars are being born!. (Yes, that’s something you and your students can really work on from your home computer.) If you’re looking for a project to get yourself started, this might be a good choice. 😊

❡ 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. A different theme is chosen each month; 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. 📸

❡ Books in the running brooks: If you decide to participate in eBird, our recommended homeschool reference library (riverhouses.org/books) includes an excellent bird guide that would serve your family well. And for any astronomical projects you may join, our recommended backyard night-sky guide and world atlas (which has an astronomical section) will help you orient yourself to the objects you are studying in the starry vault above. 🦉 🌠

❡ Whether they work together or apart: This is one of our regular Lunar Society Bulletins about the many cooperative research projects we recommend to homeschool students. Add your name to our free weekly mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get more great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🗞

🇪🇹 WEEKLY WORLD HERITAGE: Ancient Aksum in Ethiopia

11 December 2019 by Bob O'Hara

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-aksum

Ethiopia in eastern Africa is one of our homeschool countries-of-the-week, so why not spend a few minutes today learning about one of Ethiopia’s World Heritage Sites: Ancient Aksum.

“A gold coin of the Axumite king Ousas [ca. A.D. 500], specifically a one third solidus, diameter 17 mm, weight 1.50 gm.” (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

Ancient Aksum (or Axum) was a major center of commerce linking Africa and the Roman Empire:

“Situated in the highlands of northern Ethiopia, Aksum symbolizes the wealth and importance of the civilization of the ancient Aksumite kingdom, which lasted from the 1st to the 8th centuries AD. The kingdom was at the crossroads of the three continents: Africa, Arabia, and the Greco-Roman World, and was the most powerful state between the Eastern Roman Empire and Persia. In command of the ivory trade with Sudan, its fleets controlled the Red Sea trade through the port of Adulis and the inland routes of north eastern Africa.

“The ruins of the ancient Aksumite Civilization covered a wide area in the Tigray Plateau. The most impressive monuments are the monolithic obelisks, royal tombs, and the palace ruins dating to the 6th and 7th centuries AD. Several stelae survive in the town of Aksum dating between the 3rd and 4th centuries AD. The largest standing obelisk rises to a height of over 23 meters and is exquisitely carved to represent a nine-storey building of the Aksumites.“ (UNESCO World Heritage Centre #15)

Ethiopian legends (much embroidered through the centuries) say that Aksum was the home of the Queen of Sheba mentioned in the Hebrew Bible.

The ruins of Dungur Palace in Aksum, locally known as “the Palace of the Queen of Sheba.” (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 post 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 will you be exploring in your homeschool this Orion 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 one-paragraph 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 historic sites of international importance. Download your own 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. 🌍

📚 BOOKS: A New World Almanac for the New 2020 Year

10 December 2019 by Bob O'Hara

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2020-almanac

Here at the River Houses we recommend six standard reference books for every homeschooling family — not children’s books but family books that can serve both parents and students, that can support any curriculum you choose to follow, and that can help to make you a better teacher. Five of these books are permanent additions to your library that should last for many years, but the sixth is one that needs to be periodically renewed: the annual World Almanac and Book of Facts, available shortly in its 2020 edition:

➢ 2020 World Almanac and Book of Facts (amzn.to/2PlnWh9)

The annual World Almanac, published for more than 150 years, makes an ideal Christmas or New Year’s gift for your students. I just ordered my copy yesterday and it’s expected to arrive right before the holidays.

Modern almanacs are really one-volume desk encyclopedias, packed with information about everything from science and technology (did you know the top speed of a reindeer is 32 miles per hour?), to world history and geography (did you know the average depth of the Indian Ocean is 12,800 feet?), to artists, entertainers, and notable personalities (did you know Robert Penn Warren was the first Poet Laureate of the United States?), and much, much more.

If you have a fact-devouring student — and many students go through a fact-devouring stage — there’s no better entertainment than the annual World Almanac. (Did you know the island-nation of Tuvalu has a population of only 11,147?) And for general reference questions on almost any subject, the World Almanac is usually the best place to start. (Did you know Kalamazoo College in Michigan was founded in 1833?)

To get the most out of your almanac, notice that the major sections are marked with black tabs along the book’s fore-edge, and that these tabs are labeled on the back cover: “Special Features, Year in Review,” “Economy, Business, Energy,” “Health & Vital Statistics,” and so on. (That’s from the 2019 edition.) And while open-ended browsing of the almanac can be endlessly interesting, be sure that your students also know how to use the comprehensive alphabetical index at the end of the volume when they are trying to locate a specific piece of information.

We regularly refer to material from the World Almanac and Book of Facts in our River Houses postings, and starting in January our page references will change over from the 2019 edition to the 2020 edition. Add a new 2020 almanac to your homeschool library and join us as we teach and learn our way through the new year.

❡ Take note: The World Almanac and Book of Facts is available in both paperback and hardcover editions. The paperback is less expensive, but it’s also reduced in size making the type exceedingly small for grownup eyes, although your young scholars may have no trouble with it. I always use the hardcover edition.

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

🖋 WONDERFUL WORDS: Happy Birthday to Emily Dickinson!

10 December 2019 by Bob O'Hara

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-dickinson

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. It’s poem for all lovers of books and language, and a great one for your young homescholars to memorize:

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 a somewhat prominent state politician, 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 American writers of the nineteenth century.

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 traditional 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 homeschool students to Emily Dickinson this week on the occasion of her birthday — your local library will be a great place to start — and they’ll have a new friend and a loosened spirit for life.

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

❡ He ate and drank the precious words: 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. 😊

❡ Explore more: The website of the Poetry Foundation 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. 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. 📖

🎵 🎄 HOLIDAY MUSIC MONTH: Introducing Vince Guaraldi

9 December 2019 by Bob O'Hara

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-guaraldi

The origins of some seasonal classics are lost in the mists of time, but for others, we know just when and where they arrived on the scene. That’s the case for Vince Guaraldi’s instant American classic “Christmas Time is Here,” one of the musical favorites from the 1965 TV special “A Charlie Brown Christmas”:

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

The American composer and jazz musician Vince Guaraldi (1928–1976) was born in San Francisco and achieved early success in the west coast music scene in the 1950s. Producer Lee Mendelson (b. 1933), who was developing the first Peanuts holiday specials in the early 1960s, heard Guaraldi’s music on the radio and invited him to write the score for “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” and the rest is musical history.

Most of Guaraldi’s compositions were intended to be purely instrumental, but for the best-known piece, “Christmas Time is Here,” Mendelson himself wrote lyrics:

Christmas Time is Here

Christmas time is here,
Happiness and cheer,
Fun for all that children call
Their favorite time of year.
Snowflakes in the air,
Carols everywhere,
Olden times and ancient rhymes
Of love and dreams to share.
Sleigh bells in the air,
Beauty everywhere,
Yuletide by the fireside
And joyful memories there.
Christmas time is here,
Families drawing near,
Oh, that we could always see
Such spirit through the year.
Sleigh bells in the air,
Beauty everywhere,
Yuletide by the fireside,
And joyful memories there.
Christmas time is here,
Families drawing near,
Oh, that we could always see
Such spirit through the year.

Jazz is a distinctly American genre of music, although it is now played all over the world. Guaraldi’s work for the Peanuts specials included not only fully original jazz pieces, but also new jazz arrangements of traditional Christmas carols such as the old German classic “O Tannenbaum”:

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Why not introduce your students to some of Guaraldi’s wonderful works this month and invite them to learn more about jazz and its rich history.

What marvelous musical discoveries will you be making in your homeschool during this Holiday Music Month? 😊

🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 8 December 2019

8 December 2019 by Bob O'Hara

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-12-08

🎵 🎄 December is Holiday Music Month in the River Houses, and throughout the month we continue to share an assortment of our seasonal favorites — classical and modern, sacred and secular, serious and silly — along with a collection of educational notes that will help you teach little homeschool lessons all along the way.

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Kentucky, and our COUNTRIES are Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) 🇸🇿, Ethiopia 🇪🇹, Fiji 🇫🇯, and Finland 🇫🇮. (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).

🗓 TODAY, Sunday (8 December 2019) — Today is the 342nd day of 2019; there are 23 days remaining in the year. Learn more about different kinds of modern and historical calendars on pages 358–364 in your River Houses almanac (riverhouses.org/books). 📚 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. 🎭 And 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 (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us throughout the year. 🖋

Monday (9 December 2019) — 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 now-classic music by Vince Guaraldi (1928–1976), premiered on CBS television. 🎄

Tuesday (10 December 2019) — Today is the birthday Augusta Ada (Byron) King, Countess of Lovelace (1815–1852), a pioneer of computer science (long before the field existed). 🖥 It’s also the birthday of the great American poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886). 🎂

Wednesday (11 December 2019) — 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). 🖋

Thursday (12 December 2019) — 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.). 📻 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). 🌕

Friday (13 December 2019) — It’s Friday the 13th! 🙀 Our Friday Bird Families post this week will introduce you to the Gulls, Terns, and Skimmers. Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us throughout the year. 🦅

Saturday (14 December 2019) — 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. For an illustrated review of the final phases of the exploration of our planet’s surface, turn to pages 320–321 in your homeschool history encyclopedia (riverhouses.org/books). 🎿 And since this is the second Saturday of the month, we’ll introduce you to another one of the Great Stars of the northern hemisphere night sky. This month: Aldebaran, the brightest star in the constellation Taurus the Bull. 🌟

Sunday (15 December 2019) — 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 WEEKLY TOAST, for the holiday season: “May our feast days be many and our fast days be few.”

🌍 EVERYTHING FLOWS: The African nation of Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Komati River, one of the principal rivers of Eswatini. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas (riverhouses.org/books), and you can read more about it in the Komati River entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

The Maguga Dam on the Komati River in Eswatini. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

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

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