For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-09-29
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.
🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Connecticut, and our COUNTRIES are Belgium 🇧🇪, Belize 🇧🇿, Benin 🇧🇯, and Bhutan 🇧🇹. (Our separate Sunday States & Countries post for the week went up just a few minutes ago.)
🌒 THE MOON at the beginning of this week is a waxing crescent, just past new (yesterday) — an excellent time for stargazing! You can explore the night sky and the features of the moon in your recommended backyard astronomy guide and your homeschool world atlas, and you can learn many more stellar and lunar facts on pages 342–357 in your almanac (riverhouses.org/books).
🗓 TODAY (Sunday, 29 September 2019) — Today is the 272nd day of 2019; there are 93 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). 📚 Today is the birthday of the great Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616). 🇪🇸 It’s also the birthday of the pioneering Austrian–American economic philosopher Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973). 💵 And not only that, it’s also the birthday of the great Italian–American physicist and Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi (1901–1954). ⚛️
Monday (30 September 2019) — Today is the birthday of William Wrigley, Jr. (1861–1932), founder of the Wrigley chewing gum company. 👦🏻👧🏼 And the Hoover Dam on the Arizona–Nevada border was dedicated on this day in 1935. 🍾
Tuesday (1 October 2019) — The first Ford Model T automobile was put on sale on this day in 1908. The price was $825. 🚗 Since this is the first Tuesday of the month, today we’ll invite you to browse a new Dewey Decimal class with your students on your next visit to your local library. This month: Class 000 (General Works). 📚 And our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the first week of October is “To Autumn” by John Keats, perhaps the most famous fall poem in the English language and a work every student of literature should know. 🍂 Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us throughout the year. 🖋
Wednesday (2 October 2019) — Today is the birthday of Indian lawyer, philosopher, and political leader Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948). 🇮🇳 And the comic strip Peanuts premiered on this day in 1950. 📰
Thursday (3 October 2019) — Today is the birthday of English veterinarian James Herriot (1916–1995), author of All Creatures Great and Small and other popular books on animals. 🐑🐂🐓🐖🐐
Friday (4 October 2019) — On this day in 1582, the Gregorian calendar was adopted on the European continent by decree of Pope Gregory (of course) XIII. Today was the 4th of the month, and tomorrow was declared to be the 15th. (The English-speaking world didn’t make the change for almost two more centuries.) 🗓 Our Friday Bird Families this week are two very different groups of aquatic birds, the Grebes and Flamingos. Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow along with us throughout the year. 🐦
Saturday (5 October 2019) — Today is the birthday of the American engineer Robert Goddard (1882–1945), inventor of the liquid-fueled rocket. 🚀 And since Goddard’s birthday also happens to be the first Saturday of the month, we’ll appropriately enough post our regular monthly preview today of some of the astronomical events you and your students can watch for over the next few weeks. 🔭
Sunday (6 October 2019) — Today is the birthday of the Norwegian explorer and ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl (1914–2002). 🌊
🥂 OUR WEEKLY TOAST: “May truth and liberty prevail throughout the world.”
❡ 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 Perfect Gentleman; or, Etiquette and Eloquence (New York, 1860). What will you toast this week? 🥂
🌍 EVERYTHING FLOWS: Belgium is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Yser River, which flows through Belgium and part of France and empties into the North Sea at Nieuwpoort, Belgium. You can chart its course in your recommended homeschool atlas (riverhouses.org/books), and you can read more about it in the Yser 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. 🗓
