The River Houses Homeschool Network

🏡 WELCOME! (Pinned Post)

1 January 2022 by Bob O'Hara

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

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

🌕 RESEARCH PROJECTS for Homeschoolers – January 2022

17 January 2022 by Bob O'Hara

(If you have homeschool teens who want to develop independent research skills for college or career, take a look at the many online projects we recommend. Some can be done indoors and some outdoors; some are scientific and some are historical; all of them are real projects that contribute to the growth of knowledge. The post below is my monthly report on the ones I myself participate in. Take a look at the whole list and find one or two that appeal to you and your students and get started today!)

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 our list of just 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)

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. 🔬 🔭 🖥 🦋 🔍 ⚗️ ⛏ 📖 🌲 😊

❡ New from the Library of Congress: If you have a history or natural history student in your homeschool, take a look at the new project available from the Library of Congress on the life and work of American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. 🌳

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 have been documenting the birds of a local college campus that I frequently visit. So far I’ve contributed a total of 418 checklists (observation reports) for this locality — it’s a site that has never been documented before. As more checklists are added, and as eBird combines them and charts them automatically, you can get a real sense of seasonal distribution and migration patterns at this location:

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

➢ Sample Checklist for Campus Site S75408328 (ebird.org)

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 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 Einstein@Home project, which studies neutron stars; (2) the MilkyWay@Home project, which studies the history and structure of our galaxy; and (3) the Asteroids@Home project, which calculates the shapes and orbits of poorly-known asteroids. (Yes, those are projects you and your students can really contribute to.)

❡ Note: Asteroids@Home is unfortunately down at present because of hardware problems. That’s a real-world lesson for students too: in actual scientific research, equipment sometimes breaks down.

I’ve created River Houses team pages for each of these projects (Einstein@Home team, MilkyWay@Home team, Asteroids@Home team). Once your computer is signed up to participate you can join one of these teams and you can 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 it’s running, Einstein@Home has a cool screensaver that shows you in real time what your computer is analyzing.) 📡

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 specific 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 have you been 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. 🌕

❡ 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 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 that we recommend to homeschool students. Add your name to our free weekly mailing list and get more great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🗞

🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 16 January 2022

16 January 2022 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. Add your name to our free mailing list to get posts like these delivered right to your mailbox each week. Visit our River Houses calendar page to print your own homeschool calendars and planners for the entire year.

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Mississippi, and our COUNTRIES are India 🇮🇳, Indonesia 🇮🇩, Iran 🇮🇷, and Iraq 🇮🇶. (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 331–346 in your almanac. Browse through our many astronomy posts for even more.

🗓 TODAY, Sunday (16 January 2022) — Today is the 16th day of 2022; there are 349 days remaining in this common year. Learn more about different kinds of modern and historical calendars on pages 347–353 in your River Houses almanac. 📚 On this day in the year 27 B.C., the Roman Senate conferred the title “Augustus” on the general and de facto dictator Octavian, the great-nephew and adopted son of Julius Caesar, and the last remnants of the old republic were swept away. 👑

Monday (17 January 2022) — Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a federal holiday in the United States. Lift every voice and sing! 🇺🇸 Benjamin Franklin was born on this day in 1706 in Boston, Massachusetts. 📰 One of the most important battles in the Southern Theater of the American Revolution, the Battle of Cowpens, took place on this day in 1781 near Cowpens, South Carolina. ⚔️ 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. 🌕

Tuesday (18 January 2022) — On this day in 1788, the first convict ships from Britain, now known as the First Fleet, arrived at Botany Bay, Australia. 🇦🇺 And today is the birthday of the Polish-British mathematician and historian of science Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974), creator of the pioneering documentary series “The Ascent of Man.” 📺

Wednesday (19 January 2022) — Today is the birthday of the polemical American lawyer and freedom-philosopher Lysander Spooner (1808–1887). ⚖️ It’s also the birthday of the spooky American poet and short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849). 👻 And our Wednesday tour of World Heritage Sites this week will take you to Golestan Palace in Iran. 🇮🇷

Thursday (20 January 2022) — One of the first two men to walk on the moon, American astronaut Buzz Aldrin, was born on this day in 1930. 👨‍🚀

Friday (21 January 2022) — Today is St. Agnes Day, named for Agnes of Rome, a teenage Christian martyr of the fourth century and a favorite subject of artists and writers for hundreds of years. On this day, saith tradition, young girls will have their future husbands revealed to them in their dreams: “Agnes sweet, and Agnes fair, / Hither, hither, now repair; / Bonny Agnes, let me see / The lad who is to marry me.” 💍 Our Friday Bird Families post this week will introduce you to the New World Vultures, Ospreys, Hawks, Kites, and Eagles. Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦅

Saturday (22 January 2022) — Today is the birthday of two great English poets: John Donne (1573–1631) and George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824). 🖋 And speaking of poetry, our homeschool poem-of-the-week for last week of January is John Masefield’s “Sea Fever,” in memory of the Space Shuttle Challenger and its crew, who died 28 January 1986. Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us throughout the year. 🌊

Sunday (23 January 2022) — Today is the birthday of John Hancock (1737–1793), president of the Continental Congress and the most flamboyant signer of the Declaration of Independence. 🖋 And on this day in 1849, the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States, Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910), graduated from the Geneva Medical College in New York. 👩‍⚕️

🥂 OUR WEEKLY TOAST is an old traditional offering: “May all our real wants be supplied, and all our virtuous wishes satisfied.”

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

🌍 🇮🇷 EVERYTHING FLOWS: Iran in southwestern Asia is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Haraz River, which flows northward through northern Iran and into the Caspian Sea. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Haraz River entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

The Haraz River in Iran’s Mazandaran Province. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

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

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

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

🌎 🇺🇸 SUNDAY STATES: Mississippi, India, Iraq, and More

16 January 2022 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 our recommended homeschool reference library includes a current world almanac, a world atlas, and a history encyclopedia that make these reviews fun and easy. Our own annual review begins at the start of the River Houses year in September and goes through the states in the traditional order of admission to the Union (page 418 in your brand new 2022 almanac), so this week’s state is:

🇺🇸
Mississippi State Seal
MISSISSIPPI (the 20th state, 10 December 1817) — The Magnolia State. Capital: Jackson. Mississippi can be found on page 575 in your almanac and on plates 42 and 142 in your atlas (10th and 11th eds.). Name origin: “Probably Chippewa mici zibi, meaning ‘great river’ or ‘gathering-in of all the waters.’ Also Algonquin word messipi” (almanac page 419). State bird: Northern Mockingbird (bird guide page 416). Website: www.ms.gov.

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

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

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

🇮🇳 INDIA in southern Asia. Population: 1,399,330,514. Capital: New Delhi. Government: Federal parliamentary republic. Website: www.india.gov.in (in English and Hindi).
🇮🇩 INDONESIA in southeastern Asia. Population: 275,122,131. Capital: Jakarta. Government: Presidential republic. Website: www.indonesia.go.id (in Indonesian and English).
🇮🇷 IRAN in southwestern Asia. Population: 85,888,910. Capital: Tehran. Government: Theocratic republic. Website: www.president.ir (in Persian, English, and Arabic).
🇮🇶 IRAQ in the Middle East. Population: 39,650,145. Capital: Baghdad. Government: Federal parliamentary republic. Website: gds.gov.iq (in Arabic and English).

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

What grand global geographical excursions (real or virtual) have you been 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 and show your students how to locate rivers, lakes, marshes, water depths, mountains and their elevations, highway numbers, airports, oil fields, railroads, ruins, battle sites, small towns, big cities, regional capitals, national capitals, parks, deserts, glaciers, borders, grid references, lines of longitude and latitude, and much more. There is so much information packed into professional maps of this kind that a magnifying glass is always helpful, even for young folks with good eyesight. The endpapers of the atlas and the technical map-reading information on Plate 2 (10th and 11th eds.) will guide you in your voyages of discovery. 🗺

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

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

🖋 🎵 WONDERFUL WORDS (and Music!): Lift Every Voice and Sing

15 January 2022 by Bob O'Hara

The American minister and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was born on this day in 1929, and in his honor our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the third week of January is “Lift Every Voice and Sing” by James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938). (The Martin Luther King federal holiday this year will be observed on Monday the 17th, the third Monday in January.)

“Lift Every Voice” was written for a Lincoln’s Birthday celebration in the year 1900 at the then-segregated Stanton School in Jacksonville, Florida, where James Weldon Johnson was a teacher. Johnson’s brother, the composer John Rosamond Johnson (1873–1954), set the words to music. “Lift Every Voice” became so popular that within a few years it came to be known as “the Negro National Hymn” — and now today, as a great patriotic song for all Americans:

Lift Every Voice and Sing

Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us.
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in Thy path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand, may we forever stand,
True to our God, true to our native land.

When you introduce your students to a new poem, especially one in a traditional form, take your time, and be sure to show them the craftsmanship in the work. “Lift Every Voice” has three stanzas of ten lines each — that already looks quite carefully structured. What about the rhyme scheme? Look at how detailed, complex, and regular it is: I’d mark up the first stanza as AA BCCB DD EE. What about the second and third stanzas? Exactly the same — that’s quite a precise accomplishment. By investigating these details of structure your students will come to appreciate good poems as carefully crafted pieces of literary labor.

Here’s a wonderful live performance of “Lift Every Voice,” arranged by musicologist Roland Carter and sung by the Winston Salem State University Choir in North Carolina, with Carter himself as conductor:

I’d like to think Abraham Lincoln, James Weldon Johnson, and Martin Luther King Jr. would all agree with that well-earned round of applause.

What wonderful words and poetical productions have you been studying in your homeschool this Orion Term? 😊

❡ Till earth and heaven ring: 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. 🎵

❡ Literary lives: The website of the Poetry Foundation includes biographical notes and examples of the work of many important poets (including James Weldon Johnson) that are suitable for high school students and homeschool teachers. 🖋

❡ Explore more: For a quick homeschool review of the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr., turn to page 432 in your River Houses history encyclopedia. 📚

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

🗓 🗡 HAPPY CROSS-QUARTER DAY of Orion Term 2021–2022

14 January 2022 by Bob O'Hara

The educational value of the calendar is one of our themes in the River Houses, and we divide the homeschool year into four three-month terms (quarters) that are named 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)

Today, January 14th, is the midpoint of Orion Term — in many old calendrical systems it would be called the cross-quarter day of Orion Term.

Third-century Roman calendar mosaic from Tunisia, featuring our Orion Term: *December*, *Ianuarius*, and *Febr*[u]*arius*. Even two thousand years ago people had trouble spelling *February*. (Image: Ad Meskens/Wikimedia Commons.)

Orion Term 2021–2022 as it appears in our annual River Houses homeschool calendar.
January 14th is underlined as the cross-quarter day of Orion Term.

The cross-quarter day of each term is a good day to look around and see how things are going. Is your schedule working well? Did you have a plan for some task or project that didn’t turn out as expected and just needs to be dropped? Is there something new you need to add?

If you haven’t done so already, why not print out some of our simple one-page educational calendars and planners for this 2021–2022 homeschool year — they won’t constrain you, and they’ll help you create a light structure for your own homeschool year:

➢ River Houses Homeschool Calendars and Planners

And also if you haven’t yet, why not sign up for our free email newsletter — it’s just one message a week, all educational, with no politics and no spam:

➢ Weekly River Houses Homeschool Newsletter

If you belong to other online or offline homeschool groups, won’t you share our newsletter link with them? We’d be delighted to have more subscribers!

What calendrical events have you been marking and what educational discoveries have you been making in your homeschool this Orion Term? 😊

❡ Quarter days and cross-quarter days: Dividing the year into quarters is an ancient and natural practice: the annual movement of the sun across the sky automatically gives us two equinoxes, two solstices, and four seasons. Our four terms are just a simple modification of that arrangement so that our River Houses calendar will align more conveniently with the “meteorological seasons” (rather than the astronomical seasons) and with the customary American school year. In many traditional calendrical systems, going back into the Middle Ages, the first day of each quarter is called the quarter day and the midpoint of each quarter is called the cross-quarter day. That means the quarter days of the River Houses year are 1 September, 1 December, 1 March, and 1 June, and the cross-quarter days are 16 October, 14 January (15 January in Leap Years), 15 April, and 16 July. (Fun fact: a vestige of the old system of quarter and cross-quarter days is Groundhog Day, also known as Candlemas on the Christian calendar: it’s the cross-quarter day between the winter solstice and the spring equinox.) Quarter days have for centuries been the traditional days on which school terms began, so homeschoolers who follow our four-term River Houses calendar are participating in a very ancient tradition indeed. 🗓

❡ Here, said the year: This is one of our occasional posts about our Homeschool Terms & Calendars. Print your own set of River Houses Calendars to follow along with us, and add your name to our weekly mailing list to get great homeschooling ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🗞

🦅 FRIDAY BIRD FAMILIES: Herons, Bitterns, Ibises, and Spoonbills

14 January 2022 by Horace the Otter 🦦

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

This week’s birds (two different families) are the Herons and Bitterns (pages 258–265) and the Ibises and Spoonbills (pages 266–267).

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

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

HERONS · BITTERNS — Family Ardeidae. Wading birds; most have long legs, neck, and bill for stalking food in shallow water. Graceful crests and plumes adorn some species in breeding season. Soft-part colors also brighten on most species, especially at onset of breeding season. This plumage is referred to as ‘high breeding.’ On some species, these colors can become more intense suddenly, only to fade a few minutes later. Species: 63 World, 20 N.A. [North America]

IBISES · SPOONBILLS — Family Threskiornithidae. Gregarious, heronlike birds that feed with long, specialized bills: slender and decurved in ibises, wide and spatulate in spoonbills. Species: 34 World, 4 N.A.

When you’re training your young naturalists, teach them to ask and answer from their bird guide some of the first questions any naturalist would ask about a new group — about the Ibises and Spoonbills, for example. How many species? (34 worldwide.) Are there any near us? (Only 4 species in North America, and the individual maps will give us more detail.) What are their distinctive features? (Gregarious, long-legged and long-necked, specialized bills, and so on.) (And “gregarious” and “spatulate” are certainly a wonderful words, aren’t they — be sure to send someone to your homeschool dictionary to look them up.) 🔎

Pick a representative species or two to look at in detail each week and read the entry aloud, or have your students study it and then narrate it back to you, explaining all the information it contains. This week, for the Heron family, why not investigate one of biggest and most widespread herons in North America: the Great Blue Heron (page 258).

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 Great Blue Heron? (46 inches tall — nearly four feet — with a six-foot wingspan.) What is its scientific name? (Ardea herodias.) Will you be able to find this species where you live? (Probably, since it occurs across all of North America.) At what times of year and in what habitat? (Study the range map and range description carefully to answer those questions, and see the book’s back flap for a map key.) Do the males and females look alike? The adults and juveniles? What song or call does this species make? How can you distinguish it from similar species? (The text and illustrations should answer all these questions.)

The Great Blue Heron is a magnificent bird, and one of the biggest birds the average person in the United States is ever likely to see. They are reasonably tolerant of humans and can be found on the banks of urban ponds and streams as well as in remoter areas. Like almost all herons, they generally feed by standing motionless in shallow water and darting their long necks out to grab unsuspecting fish, frogs, or invertebrates as they pass by. In flight, even at a distance, herons can easily be distinguished from other long-necked bird such as cranes because they fly with their necks pulled back rather than extended.

For the Ibis and Spoonbill family, why not look at one of the most spectacular North American birds, the Roseate Spoonbill (page 266).

Spoonbills are large heronlike birds with, as their name suggests, strange spoon-shaped (spatulate) bills. They’re mainly found in Central America but do occur up along the Gulf Coast and around into southern Florida. (Those of us in the northern tier are out of luck on this species.)

You can do little ten-minute lessons of this kind 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. You could look at, for example, one of the tiniest herons, the Least Bittern (page 258), only a foot long and very good at hiding deep in the marshes.

And if you want to hear one of the strangest bird songs in all of North America, take a listen to the Least Bittern’s larger cousin, the American Bittern: oonk-a-lunk!

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

What ornithological observations and naturalistical notes have you been 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, it can be made solitary or social, and birds can be found just about anywhere at any season of the year. Why not track your own homeschool bird observations using the free eBird website sponsored by Cornell University. It’s a great way to learn more about what’s in your local area and about how bird populations change from season to season. 🐦

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

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

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

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

🌍 🇭🇺 WEEKLY WORLD HERITAGE: The Tokaj Wine Region in Hungary

12 January 2022 by Bob O'Hara

Hungary in central Europe is one of our homeschool countries-of-the-week, so why not spend a few minutes today learning about one of Hungary’s World Heritage Sites: the Tokaj Wine Region Historic Cultural Landscape.

Grape cultivation has been an important agricultural activity in northern Hungary for at least a thousand years:

Located at the foothills of the Zemplén Mountains (in North-East Hungary), along the Bodrog river and at the confluence of the Bodrog and the Tisza Rivers, the Tokaj Wine Region Historic Cultural Landscape was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2002. The World Heritage property and its buffer zone together cover the administrative area of 27 settlements (13,245 ha and 74,879 ha, so 88,124 ha in total). The entire landscape, its organisation and its character are specially shaped in interaction with the millennial and still living tradition of wine production. Documented history of the wine region since 1561 attests that grape cultivation as well as the making of the ‘aszú’ wine has been permanent for centuries in the area surrounded by the three Sátor-hegy (the Tokaj-hill, the Sátor–hill of Abaújszántó, and the Sátor-hill of Sátoraljaújhely). The legal base of delimitation of the wine region is among the first in the world and dates back to 1737 when the decree of Emperor Charles VI (Charles III, King of Hungary) established the area as a closed wine region.

The unique combination of topographic, environmental and climatic conditions of the Tokaj Wine Region, with its volcanic slopes, wetlands creating a special microclimate that favours the apparition of the “noble rote” (Botrytis cinerea), as well as the surrounding oak-woods have long been recognized as outstandingly favourable for grape cultivation and specialized wine production. All these features have enabled the development of vineyards, farms, villages, small towns and historic networks of wine cellars carved by hand into mostly volcanic rocks, which are the most characteristic structures in Tokaj: that of King Kalman in Tarcal is known to have been in existence as early as 1110. There are two basic types of cellar in Tokaj: the vaulted and the excavated. The socio-cultural, ethnic and religious diversity of the inhabitants, together with the special fame of the Tokaji Aszú Wine has contributed to the rich and diverse cultural heritage of the region. (World Heritage Centre #1063)

You can find a gallery of additional photos of the Tokaj Wine Region Historic Cultural Landscape on the World Heritage Centre’s website.

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

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

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

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

📚 LIBRARY LESSONS: Projects for You from the Library of Congress

11 January 2022 by Bob O'Hara

If you’ve got an American history student in your homeschool, take a look at some of the new independent projects you can join through the Library of Congress.

Tuesday is our regular Books & Libraries Day in the River Houses when we recommend book-related and library-related resources you can browse, save, and share with your students. The wonderful “By the People” program at the Library of Congress invites members of the public (like you and your homeschool students) to help document and transcribe important items in the Library’s collections. (It’s one of our recommended Lunar Society programs for homeschoolers.) A new project to document the works of America’s premier landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903), has just come online:

➢ By Design: Frederick Law Olmsted & Associates (loc.gov)

Olmsted is often called the father of landscape architecture in the United States, and he and his many associates designed some of the most famous parks and public grounds in the country, from Central Park in New York City to the campus of Stanford University in Californa.

The Library of Congress Manuscript Division is home to the personal papers of Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) and the records of the landscape architecture firm, Olmsted Associates. As a young man Olmsted trained in horticulture and civil engineering. He worked as an organic farmer, travel writer, investigative journalist, and editor. His travels took him across the Atlantic and to the American South and Texas, where he observed slavery in progress. On the eve of the Civil War, he designed Central Park in New York with Calvert Vaux and became the park’s superintendent, promoting the “parks for the people” concept. During wartime he organized sanitation and medical relief services for the Union cause, managed a gold mining estate in the Sierra foothills, and became involved in early ideas for the public conservation and recreational use of Yosemite.

He returned to the East Coast after war’s end, and for the rest of his career pursued his calling as a landscape architect. Over many decades Olmsted and his various partners, including sons Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and John Charles Olmsted, planned an amazing array of greenspaces for public and private use, including city parks, grounds of government buildings, campuses, expositions, hospitals, hotels and resorts, cemeteries, highways and garden parkways, residential communities and private estates. They helped to pioneer the professions of urban planning and landscape architecture, and to shape state and national park systems. Along the way, the Olmsteds collaborated with architects, city planners, park commissioners, botanists, arborists, public officials, businesses, and private citizens. (loc.gov)

You and your students can sign up to help transcribe and document the Olmsted materials online and make them available to historians and the general public. If this particular project doesn’t happen to appeal to you, here are two other recently posted American history projects you can join:

➢ Clara Barton: “Angel of the Battlefield” (loc.gov)

➢ Theater for the People: Federal Theatre Project Playbills (loc.gov)

Projects like these offer homeschool students exceptional opportunities to develop independent study and research skills, and they are the opposite of busy-work: your students’ participation makes a genuine contribution to the accessibility of these valuable historical resources. Why not pick out a project for your homeschool and work on it into the new year.

What educational discoveries have you been making in your favorite library this Orion Term? 😊

❡ Dukedoms large enough: Have you found all the local libraries in your area? There may be more than you realize, and there’s no better homeschool field trip than a field trip to a new library! The WorldCat Library Finder will help you find all the library collections near you — public and private, large and small — and the WorldCat catalog itself will help you locate the closest copy of almost any book in the world. 🏛

❡ Books in the running brooks: The sidebar on the River Houses website has links to several wonderful online library collections that we like to explore. Why not sit yourself down at a large screen for a while (rather than a phone) and give them a browse. 🔍

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

🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 9 January 2022

9 January 2022 by Bob O'Hara

📖 Have you gotten your NEW WORLD ALMANAC for the new 2022 year?

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Indiana, and our COUNTRIES are Haiti 🇭🇹, Honduras 🇭🇳, Hungary 🇭🇺, and Iceland 🇮🇸. (Our separate Sunday States & Countries post for the week went up just a few minutes ago.)

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

🗓 TODAY, Sunday (9 January 2022) — Today is the 9th day of 2022; there are 356 days remaining in this common year. Learn more about different kinds of modern and historical calendars on pages 347–353 in your (brand new 2022!) River Houses almanac. 📚 On this day in 1923, Spanish engineer Juan de la Cierva made the first successful flight in an autogyro, the ancestor of the modern helicopter. 🚁

Monday (10 January 2022) — On this day in the year 49 B.C., Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon river and approached the city of Rome with his army, touching off a civil war that led to the destruction of the Roman Republic and the eventual formation of the Roman Empire. For an illustrated overview of the life and times of Julius Caesar and his outsized impact on the Western world, see pages 108–109 in your homeschool history encyclopedia. ⚔️

Tuesday (11 January 2022) — Today is the birthday of Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804), the first United States Secretary of the Treasury, whose portrait appears on our $10 bills. 💵 It’s also the birthday of William James (1842–1910), one of the founders of the modern field of psychology. 🧠

Wednesday (12 January 2022) — Today is the birthday of the French author Charles Perrault (1628–1703), who gave the world Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, and many other beloved fairy tales. 🛌 It’s also the birthday of the American writer Jack London (1876–1916). 🐺 Our Wednesday tour of World Heritage Sites this week will take you to the Tokaj Wine Region Historic Cultural Landscape in Hungary. 🇭🇺

Thursday (13 January 2022) — The National Geographic Society was founded on this day in 1888 in Washington, D.C. 🗺

Friday (14 January 2022) — Today is the midpoint of Orion Term and thus one of the four cross-quarter days of the River Houses year. How are things going? 🗓 🗡 Today is also Ratification Day. On this day in 1784 in Annapolis, Maryland, Congress ratified the Treaty of Paris, officially ending the American Revolutionary War. 🕊 Our Friday Bird Families post this week will introduce you to the long-legged Herons, Bitterns, Ibises, and Spoonbills. Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦅

Saturday (15 January 2022) — Queen Elizabeth I of England was crowned on this day in 1559. For an illustrated outline of the historical period named for her, turn to pages 260–261 in your homeschool history encyclopedia. 👑 And our poem-of-the-week for the third week of January is James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (1900), for American minister and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., born on this day in 1929. Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us throughout the year. 🇺🇸

Sunday (16 January 2022) — On this day in the year 27 B.C., the Roman Senate conferred the title “Augustus” on the general and de facto dictator Octavian, the great-nephew and adopted son of Julius Caesar, and the last remnants of the old republic were swept away. 👑

🥂 🇺🇸 OUR WEEKLY TOAST is in honor of Martin Luther King’s January 15th birthday, observed as a federal holiday on this coming Monday the 17th: “Let freedom ring!”

🌍 🇭🇺 EVERYTHING FLOWS: Hungary in central Europe is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the peaceful Zala River, which flows through the Hungarian city of Zalaegerszeg. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Zala River entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

The Zala River in western Hungary. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

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

What do you have planned for your homeschool this week, this month, and this wonderful new year? 😊

🌎 🇺🇸 SUNDAY STATES: Indiana, Haiti, Iceland, and More

9 January 2022 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 our recommended homeschool reference library includes a current world almanac, a world atlas, and a history encyclopedia that make these reviews fun and easy. Our own annual review begins at the start of the River Houses year in September and goes through the states in the traditional order of admission to the Union (page NNN in your brand new 2022 almanac), so this week’s state is:

🇺🇸
Indiana State Seal
INDIANA (the 19th state, 11 Dec 1816) — The Hoosier State. Capital: Indianapolis. Indiana can be found on page 570 in your almanac and on plates 41 and 142 in your atlas (10th and 11th eds.). Name origin: “Means ‘land of the Indians’” (almanac page 419). State bird: Northern Cardinal (bird guide page 522). Website: www.in.gov.

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

🇭🇹 HAITI in the West Indies. Population: 11,198,240. Capital: Port-au-Prince. Government: Semi-presidential republic. Website: primature.gouv.ht (in French).
🇭🇳 HONDURAS in Central America. Population: 9,346,277. Capital: Tecucigalpa. Government: Presidential republic. Website: www.presidencia.gob.hn (in Spanish).
🇭🇺 HUNGARY in east-central Europe. Population: 9,728,337. Capital: Budapest. Government: Parliamentary republic. Website: kormany.hu (in Hungarian and English).
🇮🇸 ICELAND in the northern Atlantic Ocean. Population: 354,234. Capital: Reykjavik. Government: Parliamentary republic. Website: www.iceland.is (in English).

What grand global geographical excursions (real or virtual) have you been making in your homeschool this Orion Term? 😊

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