For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-03-31 ๐
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 calendar for the entire year.
๐บ๐ธโ OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is California, and our COUNTRIES are Myanmar ๐ฒ๐ฒ, Namibia ๐ณ๐ฆ, Nauru ๐ณ๐ท, and Nepal ๐ณ๐ต. (Our separate Sunday States & Countries post for the week went up just a few minutes ago.)
๐โ THE MOON at the beginning of this week is a waning crescent โ a good time for stargazing! You can dial up this week’s constellations and explore the moon’s features with your homeschool star atlas and world atlas (riverhouses.org/books).
๐โ TODAY (Sunday, 31 March) โ Today is the 90th day of 2019; there are 275 days remaining in the year. Learn more about different kinds of modern and historical calendars on pages 358โ364 in your River Houses almanac (riverhouses.org/books). โฌฉ The great French philosopher and mathematician Renรฉ Descartes was born on this day in 1596 ๐ And on this day in 1774, Great Britain ordered the closure of the major trading port of Boston, escalating the tensions that would eventually lead to the American Revolution. ๐บ๐ธ
MONDAY (1 April) โ Monday is the birthday of the great English physician William Harvey (1578โ1657), who first described the circulation of the blood in the human body. โค๏ธ It’s also the traditional date of the annual spaghetti harvest in Ticino, Switzerland. ๐ Our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the first week of April is the Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which opens with April showers. Print your own River Houses poetry calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us throughout the year.
TUESDAY (2 April) โ The United States Mint was established on this day in 1792. ๐ฐ It’s also the birthday of the Danish novelist and children’s author Hans Christian Andersen (1805โ1875). ๐ And 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: the Technological 600s.
WEDNESDAY (3 April) โ Today is the birthday of the great English poet George Herbert (1593โ1633). ๐ It’s also the birthday of the American naturalist and author John Burroughs (1837โ1921). ๐ฒ
THURSDAY (4 April) โ Today is the birthday of the American Quaker artist Edward Hicks (1780โ1849), famous for his “Peaceable Kingdom.” ๐จ
FRIDAY (5 April) โ Happy First Contact Day! ๐ On this day in 2063, a Vulcan ship will land near Bozeman, Montana, bringing to an end our long galactic childhood. ๐ And since this is the first Friday of the month, we’ll 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. (No First Contact yet, alas.)
SATURDAY (6 April) โ The Civil War Battle of Shiloh began on this day in 1862 near Shiloh, Tennessee. โ๏ธ
SUNDAY (7 April) โ Today is the birthday of the great English poet William Wordsworth (1770โ1850).
๐ฅโ YOUR WEEKLY TOAST, for First Contact Day: “Peace and long life.” ๐ Response: “Live long and prosper.”
โกโ Toasts can be a fun educational tradition for your family table. We offer one each week โ 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 Pocock’s Everlasting Songster (Gravesend, 1804). What will you toast this week?
๐โ EVERYTHING FLOWS: Namibia is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is Namibia’s Fish River, a major tributary of the Orange River, which is one of the principal rivers of southern Africa. You can chart its course in your recommended homeschool atlas (riverhouses.org/books), and you can read more about it in the Fish River entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

โกโ 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 691โ693), 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? ๐
โกโ Lively springs: This 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 calendar of educational events (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us. ๐