Quick Freshes are our regular Sunday notes on the homeschool week ahead. Pick one or two (or more) of the items below each week and use them to enrich your homeschooling schedule! Print your own River Houses calendar for the year at riverhouses.org/calendars.
🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Michigan, and our COUNTRIES are Lithuania 🇱🇹, Luxembourg 🇱🇺, Macedonia 🇲🇰, and Madagascar 🇲🇬. (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 dial up this week’s constellations with your homeschool star atlas (riverhouses.org/books).
🗓 TODAY (Sunday, 24 February) — Today is the 55th day of 2019; there are 310 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 1803, the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in Marbury v. Madison, establishing the principle of judicial review. ⚖️
MONDAY (25 February) — The first African American to serve in the U.S. Congress, Hiram Rhodes Revels of Mississippi, was sworn in on this day in 1870. 🇺🇸 And today is the birthday of the great French impressionist painter and sculptor Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919). 🎨
TUESDAY (26 February) — Today is the birthday of the German-American clothing manufacturer Levi Strauss (1829–1902). 👖 It’s also the birthday of the great American songwriter and rock-and-roll pioneer Antoine “Fats” Domino (1928–2017). 🎹
WEDNESDAY (27 February) — Today is the birthday of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882), one of the most popular poets of the nineteenth century. 🖋
THURSDAY (28 February) — Happy Dord Day! 🎉
FRIDAY (1 March) — Today is the beginning of LEO TERM in the River Houses. 🦁 It’s also the birthday of the great Polish pianist and composer Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849). 🎵 Our homeschool poem-of-the-week for first week of March is an excerpt from “Aurora Leigh” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, for her upcoming birthday. Print your own River Houses poetry calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us throughout the year. 🖋 And since this is the first Friday of the month, we’ll also post our regular monthly preview today of some of the astronomical events you and your students can be on the lookout for over the next few weeks. 🌠
SATURDAY (2 March) — Today is the birthday of Sam Houston (1793–1863), the first President of the Republic of Texas. ☆
SUNDAY (3 March) — The Scottish-American engineer Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, was born on this day in 1847. 📞 And on this day in 1931, “The Star-Spangled Banner” was officially adopted as the U.S. national anthem. 🇺🇸
🥂 YOUR WEEKLY TOAST: “May the friends of our youth be the companions of our age.”
❡ 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!”). Our current set of toasts are mostly taken from an old anthology called The Pic-Nic, a Collection of Recitations, and Comic Songs, Toasts, Sentiments, &c. (London, 1816). What will you toast this week?
🌎 EVERYTHING FLOWS: Madagascar is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Namorona River, flowing from the central Madagascan highlands east into the Indian Ocean. You can chart its course in your recommended homeschool atlas (riverhouses.org/books), and you can read more about it in the Namorona River entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.
❡ 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. 🗓
