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🗓 🖋 WONDERFUL WORDS: Happy 200th to Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-whitman-200 😊

The great American poet Walt Whitman was born 200 years ago today in the little village of West Hills on Long Island, New York. Whitman’s voice is a quintessential American voice of the nineteenth century, and every homeschool student should have some familiarity with his work.

Whitman had little formal education. He worked as a newspaper boy, typesetter, writer, teacher, editor, publisher, government clerk, and during the Civil War as a nurse in the military hospitals around Washington, D.C. But regardless of how he supported himself at different times, he had determined early on that he had one goal in life, and that was to be a poet. He made his grand entrance onto the literary stage in 1855 with the publication of his book Leaves of Grass, which Ralph Waldo Emerson called “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed.”

Portrait by famed Civil War photographer Mathew Brady. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.).

Whitman’s writing is famously expansive, self-centered, visionary, and sometimes sensual in ways that probably aren’t appropriate for younger readers. But many of his poems have long been required reading in high school English classes, including “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” O Captain! My Captain!,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” and the masterpiece “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.”

Although Whitman’s poetry is rarely metrical in a formal sense, it’s nevertheless very artful, with a style that was much influenced by the sound of the King James Bible. This week for his bicentennial, why not copy this little six-line gem onto your homeschool bulletin board and read it aloud with your students a few times, and perhaps transport yourself back to the nineteenth century:

America

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair’d in the adamant of Time.

(“Oh, ‘adamant’ is a beautiful word — let’s look it up in our dictionary.” Hint: it’s noun definition #1.)

So, happy birthday, Walt! I have no doubt that we’ll be remembering you for many more years to come.

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

❡ Student research opportunities: If you have a homescholar interested in history or literature you should definitely investigate the “Whitman at 200” project at the Library of Congress. It’s a crowdsourced transcription project that you and your students can contribute to — and it would probably look really good on a homeschool college application. 🎓

❡ Chair’d in the adamant of Time: If a special line or turn of phrase happens to strike you in one of our featured 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. 😊

❡ Stay in the loop: This is one of our regular Homeschool Language & Literature posts. 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. 🗞

🐦 NATURE NOTES: Bird Migration and Unusual Weather

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

May is Bird Migration Month in the River Houses, and May is coming to a close. Down in my local riverside park the Song Sparrows are already feeding their first round of begging fledglings, and most of the May arrivals have settled in for the summer.

We think bird study is one of the best subjects you can take up in a homeschool environment, and each May we give it a little extra attention because so many birds are moving all across the North American continent. The wonderful BirdCast website (birdcast.info), sponsored by Cornell University, tracks the continent-wide pattern every year, but within that overall pattern there are always irregularities. If you have a homeschool science student interested in natural history, geography, or meteorology, those irregularities are great topics to investigate.

Every migration season, a small number of European birds will turn up somewhere in North America — we call them “accidentals” or “vagrants” — and understanding how and why that happens is an object of a lot of scientific research. Here’s a great little report to share with your science students this week on some of the accidentals that have recently appeared on North American shores:

The appearance of these accidentals is now understood to be (most often) associated with a meteorological condition called a “Greenland block” that produces unusual east-to-west weather flows across the North Atlantic. By combining studies of changing meteorological conditions with reports of accidental species occurrences (via eBird.org and other sources), we can begin to understand why, for example, a Eurasian Oystercatcher turned up in Newfoundland earlier this month, thousands of miles from its usual home.

What natural discoveries have you made in your homeschool lately? 😊

❡ Books in the running brooks: Our recommended homeschool reference library (riverhouses.org/books) includes an excellent bird guide that would serve your homeschool well. Many other similar guides are also available — find one that’s a good fit for your family and take it with you on all your outings, whether far afield or just out to the backyard. 🦉

❡ Homeschool birds: 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. 🐦

❡ Nature notes: This is one of our regular Homeschool Natural History posts. 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. 😊

🌏 🌕 🌞 AN EINSTEIN CENTENNIAL and a Famous Scientific Test ✨

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

One of our homeschool countries-of-the-week last week was the tiny island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe off the west coast of Africa. You probably won’t find too many people who have heard of that little country, but just one hundred years ago this week, the island of Príncipe was the site of one of the most famous scientific tests in history. Here’s a fun two-minute video that describes that test — it was produced at the time of the U.S. eclipse two years ago, which is mentioned at the end:

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As the video explains, Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, published in 1915, predicted that massive objects such as stars would actually bend rays of light as they passed by — but how could anyone test such a proposition? The solution, carried out by the great astronomer Arthur Eddington (1882–1944), was to take photographs of the stars around the sun at the moment of a solar eclipse (when they could be seen), and then compare those stars’ positions to their normal positions when their light wasn’t reaching us by passing right next to the sun. If Einstein was correct, the images of the stars would be slightly nudged out of place when they were right next to the sun.

A total solar eclipse was scheduled to pass across Africa, the South Atlantic, and South America on 29 May 1919 (one hundred years ago today), and Eddington travelled to Príncipe to photograph it. His results proved Einstein right: the images of the stars were slightly nudged out of place as a result of having passed by the massive sun on their way to us.

Eddington commemorative stamp from São Tomé and Príncipe, issued in 2009 (ten years ago) on the 90th anniversary of the Eddington–Einstein eclipse observations. Note the image of the eclipsed sun and the solar corona next to Eddington’s portrait.

In honor of this scientific anniversary, why not take a few minutes to drop the names of Einstein and Eddington in your homeschool this week, and read again a fact or two about São Tomé and Príncipe. And if you’re really ambitious and want to make your own homeschool contributions to the advancement of science, why not sign up for the Einstein@Home research project on your family computer, and maybe you’ll discover something grand and wonderful yourself. 🔭

What astronomical observations have you made in your homeschool this week? 😊

❡ Explore more: If you turn to page 416 in your River Houses history encyclopedia (riverhouses.org/books) you’ll find an excellent illustrated profile of Albert Einstein’s life and work, with a timeline that includes the 1919 eclipse. Plate 95 in your atlas (both map and inset) will show you again the location of the tiny island of Príncipe.

❡ Stay in the loop: This is one of our regular Homeschool Astronomy posts. 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: The Singapore Botanic Gardens

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

Singapore is one of our homeschool countries-of-the-week, so why not spend a few minutes today learning about one of Singapore’s World Heritage Sites: the Singapore Botanic Gardens.

“Phalaenopsis philippinensis orchid growing in a mist house” at the Singapore Botanic Gardens. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

The Singapore Botanic Gardens document the natural, cultural, and agricultural history of tropical Southeast Asia:

“Situated at the heart of the city of Singapore, the site demonstrates the evolution of a British tropical colonial botanic garden that has become a modern world-class scientific institution used for both conservation and education. The cultural landscape includes a rich variety of historic features, plantings and buildings that demonstrate the development of the garden since its creation in 1859. It has been an important centre for science, research and plant conservation, notably in connection with the cultivation of rubber plantations in Southeast Asia since 1875.“ (UNESCO World Heritage Centre #1483)

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.

What world treasures have you explored in your homeschool this week? 😊

❡ 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. 🇸🇬

❡ The great globe itself: This is one of our regular Homeschool States & Countries 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. 🌏

🇺🇸 MEMORIAL DAY Teaching Resources from the Library of Congress

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-lc-memorial-day 😊

Introduce your students to the music, art, history, and traditions of Memorial Day in the United States with some help from these teaching resources available at the Library of Congress:

What other holidays or anniversaries are you planning to mark in your homeschool this summer? 😊

❡ Stay in the loop: This is one of our regular Homeschool Holidays & Anniversaries posts. 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. 🗞

🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 26 May 2019

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-05-26 😊

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.

✦ This is the last week of LEO TERM, our spring term in the River Houses — the River Houses school year ends on the last day of May. Hercules Term, our summer term, begins on Saturday, the first of June.

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is North Dakota, and our COUNTRIES are Serbia 🇷🇸, Seychelles 🇸🇨, Sierra Leone 🇸🇱, and Singapore 🇸🇬. (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 third quarter — half illuminated and waning. You can dial up this week’s constellations and explore the moon’s features with your homeschool star atlas and world atlas and you can learn many more stellar and lunar facts on pages 342–357 in your almanac (riverhouses.org/books).

🗓 TODAY (Sunday, 26 May) — Today is the 146th day of 2019; there are 219 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). ⬩ And, it’s National Paper Airplane Day! ✈️

Monday (27 May) — Monday is Memorial Day in the United States, the day we remember the nation’s war dead. 🇺🇸 It’s also the birthday of the American poet and songwriter Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910), author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (“Mine eyes have seen the glory”).

Tuesday (28 May) — A solar eclipse occurred on this day in the year 585 B.C. during the Battle of the Halys River in central Anatolia, leading to a truce. The exact date of that eclipse is one of the key reference points from which other dates in ancient Near Eastern history are calculated. 🌏 🌕 🌞

Wednesday (29 May) — On this day in 1453, the city of Constantinople fell to the Ottoman armies of Sultan Mehmed II after a 53-day siege, bringing to an end the ancient Byzantine Empire that had survived for more than a thousand years. You can explore more on pages 198, 206, and 246 in your homeschool history encyclopedia (riverhouses.org/books) ⚔️ And speaking of eclipses, another solar eclipse, occurring on this day in 1919, allowed Sir Arthur Eddington to confirm Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. 🌏 🌕 🌞 And on this day in 1953, mountaineers Edmund Hillary and Tenzig Norgay became the first climbers ever to reach the summit of Mount Everest. 🏔

Thursday (30 May) — The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., was dedicated on this day in the year 1922. 🏛 Today is also the birthday of the great voice actor Mel Blanc (1908–1989), “the man of a thousand voices,” who gave us Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety Bird, Sylvester the Cat, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, Marvin the Martian, Pepé Le Pew, Speedy Gonzales, Wile E. Coyote, Road Runner, and even the Tasmanian Devil. 😺

Friday (31 May) — Today is the last day of Leo Term and the last day of the River Houses school year. 🗓 It’s also an important literary anniversary: the 200th birthday of the great American poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892), who contained multitudes.

Saturday (1 June) — HERCULES TERM, our summer term and the fourth of the four quarters of the River Houses year, begins today. 🗓 Today is the birthday of the great English poet of the sea John Masefield (1878–1967), author of the finest thing Herman Melville never said. ⚓️ Our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the first week of June is the anonymous medieval song “Sumer is i-cumin in,” for the beginning of Hercules Term. Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us throughout the year. ⛱ And since this is the first Saturday 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. 🔭

Sunday (2 June) — Today is the birthday of poet and novelist Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), whose works have been loved and loathed by high school English students for generations. 📚 Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II was crowned on this day in 1953, making her now the longest-reigning monarch in British history and the longest-serving female head of state in world history. 👑

🥂 OUR WEEKLY TOAST is our traditional final toast for end of the River Houses school year: “To life, love, and liberty.”

❡ 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 Pocock’s Everlasting Songster (Gravesend, 1804). What will you toast this week?

🌏 EVERYTHING FLOWS: Singapore is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Singapore River, which is very short but very important, as it flows through this island-nation’s central district. You can chart its course in your recommended homeschool atlas (riverhouses.org/books), and you can read more about it in the Singapore River entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

The Singapore River in downtown Singapore. (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: North Dakota, Serbia, Singapore, and More

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-north-dakota 😊

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. We go through the states in the traditional order of admission to the Union (almanac page 429), so this week’s state is:

  • 🇺🇸
    North Dakota State Quarter
    NORTH DAKOTA (the 39th state, 2 November 1889) — The Peace Garden State. Capital: Bismarck. North Dakota can be found on page 581 in your almanac and on plates 39 and 142 in your atlas. Name origin: “Sioux word ‘Dakota’, meaning ‘friend’ or ‘ally’” (almanac page 430). State bird: Western Meadowlark (bird guide page 530). Website: www.nd.gov.

❡ Little lessons: You can teach a hundred little lessons with the 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 world of new geographical and historical information, as well as a host of valuable reading and research skills. 😊

❡ Explore more: If you’re planning a comprehensive unit study of one or more of the U.S. states, be sure to investigate the primary source materials for teachers available from the Library of Congress.

This week’s countries, with their official websites, are:

  • 🇷🇸 SERBIA in southeastern Europe. Population: 7,078,110. Capital: Belgrade. Website: www.srbija.gov.rs (in Serbian and English).
  • 🇸🇨 SEYCHELLES in the Indian Ocean. Population: 94,633. Capital: Victoria. Website: www.egov.sc (in English).
  • 🇸🇱 SIERRA LEONE on the west coast of Africa. Population: 6,312,212. Capital: Freetown. Website: statehouse.gov.sl (in English).
  • 🇸🇬 SINGAPORE in southeastern Asia. Population: 5,995,991. Capital: Singapore. Website: www.gov.sg (in English).

These countries all appear in your current almanac, atlas, and history encyclopedia as well (riverhouses.org/books). The almanac, for example, has profiles of all 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 discoveries have you made in your homeschool this week? 😊

❡ 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 practice their critical reading and thinking skills.

❡ 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 a homeschool tour of the United States and the whole world over the course of the year. 🌎

🇺🇸 MEMORIAL DAY 2019

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

Monday is Memorial Day in the United States, the day we remember the nation’s war dead. Why not let some undergraduates from one of the most selective colleges in the country — the United States Military Academy at West Point — assist you in your remembrance this weekend:

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For homeschoolers, everything is an opportunity for learning. Can your students find West Point, New York, on a map and explain its significance? Although the name “West Point” is now a shorthand name for our national military academy, “West Point” proper actually refers to the high point of land that projects into the Hudson River just a few miles north (upstream) from New York City. The point forces the Hudson to make a sharp bend, and artillery placed there can easily control all traffic on the river. West Point was first fortified during the American Revolution, and it has been occupied by the United States Army ever since. The Hudson River–Lake Champlain–Richelieu River corridor between New York City and Montreal (on the St. Lawrence River) was one of the most contested military transportation routes on the North American continent for almost 200 years. Plate 44 in your River Houses atlas (riverhouses.org/books) will show you the location of West Point and let you and your students get a sense of its geographical importance.

You can also remind your students this weekend that what we now call Memorial Day was originally called Decoration Day after the custom of decorating the graves of soldiers who had fought in the Civil War. The name has changed, but the honorable custom continues, as you’ll see if you visit almost any cemetery across the country in the next few days.

[Decoration Day at Arlington National Cemetery]
Grave of General Frank. M. Andrews (1884–1943), United States Army Air Corps, Arlington National Cemetery. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1882 poem “Decoration Day” shows us why Longfellow was the most popular poet of nineteenth-century America. Why not share it with your homeschool students also on this Decoration Day weekend.

Decoration Day

Sleep, comrades, sleep and rest
On this field of the Grounded Arms,
Where foes no more molest,
Nor sentry’s shot alarms!

Ye have slept on the ground before,
And started to your feet
At the cannon’s sudden roar,
Or the drum’s redoubling beat.

But in this camp of Death
No sound your slumber breaks;
Here is no fevered breath,
No wound that bleeds and aches.

All is repose and peace,
Untrampled lies the sod;
The shouts of battle cease,
It is the Truce of God!

Rest, comrades, rest and sleep!
The thoughts of men shall be
As sentinels to keep
Your rest from danger free.

Your silent tents of green
We deck with fragrant flowers
Yours has the suffering been,
The memory shall be ours.

Longfellow’s “Decoration Day” is a fine example that you can use to teach about extended metaphors in literature. The poem draws an imaginative comparison between soldiers sleeping on their battlefield campgrounds at night, and the rows of graves in the burial ground covered by “tents” of green grass. See how many specific contrasts and comparisons you and your students can identify (the contrast between the trampled ground of the battlefield and the untrampled ground of the burying field; the comparison between the sentinel guards on the battlefield and all of us as guardians of memory on the burying field; and so on).

What other historical holidays are you marking in your homeschool this week?

❡ Stay up to date: This is one of our regular Homeschool Holidays & Anniversaries posts. 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.

👑 QUEEN VICTORIA and Educational Name-Dropping

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-victoria-200 😊

Here in the River Houses we believe in name-dropping. As you’re working and living with your students day by day and through the year, you should never miss an opportunity to drop a name, a date, a place, a term, or an idea in your students’ paths. You don’t have to go into detail, or prepare a lesson plan, or assign special reading — just drop a name. Old-time educators called it “furnishing the mind,” and that’s a very good way to describe it.

Today is a noteworthy historical anniversary: it’s the bicentennial of the birth of Britain’s Queen Victoria (1819–1901), whose life spanned nearly the entire nineteenth century and who gave her name to an entire era. “Victoria” is a name to drop in your homeschool this week.

Queen (then Princess) Victoria, self-portrait at age sixteen, 1835. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

If you drop Victoria’s name and your students decide to pick it up, they will be able to find a wealth of educational material both at your local library and online. The Wikipedia article on Victoria has been marked as one of their “featured articles” that are particularly comprehensive and well written:

Your recommended River Houses history encyclopedia (riverhouses.org/books) has an excellent illustrated summary of the Victorian era on page 348 — it was an era of extraordinary scientific, technological, and social progress, and literary accomplishment.

“Princess Victoria aged eleven,” the first of a series of bicentennial stamps depicting the life of Britain’s Queen Victoria (1819–1901). (Image: Daily Mail.)

What historical anniversaries are you studying (and what other names will you be dropping) in your homeschool this week? 😊

❡ Stay in the loop: This is one of our regular Homeschool Historical Anniversaries posts. 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: The Saloum Delta in Senegal

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

Senegal is one of our homeschool countries-of-the-week, so why not spend a few minutes today learning about one of Senegal’s World Heritage Sites: the Saloum Delta natural and cultural landscape.

The Saloum Delta region on the west coast of Senegal. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

The Saloum Delta has supported human populations in the region for at least two thousand years:

“Fishing and shellfish gathering have sustained human life in the 5,000 km2 property, which is formed by the arms of three rivers. The site comprises brackish channels encompassing over 200 islands and islets, mangrove forest, an Atlantic marine environment, and dry forest.

“The site is marked by 218 shellfish mounds, some of them several hundred metres long, produced by its human inhabitants over the ages. Burial sites on 28 of the mounds take the form of tumuli where remarkable artefacts have been found. They are important for our understanding of cultures from the various periods of the delta’s occupation and testify to the history of human settlement along the coast of West Africa.“ (UNESCO World Heritage Centre #1359)

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.

What world treasures have you explored in your homeschool this week? 😊

❡ 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. 🇸🇳

❡ The great globe itself: This is one of our regular Homeschool States & Countries 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. 🌍

🖋 🎓 GRADUATION SEASON: “Set me free to find my calling”

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-homeward-bound 😊

The end of May marks the end of the Leo Term, our spring term in the River Houses, and many homeschoolers treat the Memorial Day weekend as an opportunity to hold a family graduation ceremony. The beautiful song “Homeward Bound” by American composer Marta Keen (b. 1953) has in recent years become a staple of high school choirs around the country and of many other vocal groups as well. The narrator in the song is a young person asking permission to leave home, and promising to return. We hope that “Homeward Bound” will one day become our traditional River Houses graduation anthem. The words are our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the last week of May:

Homeward Bound

In the quiet misty morning, when the moon has gone to bed,
When the sparrows stop their singing and the sky is clear and red,
When the summer’s ceased its gleaming, when the corn is past its prime,
When adventure’s lost its meaning, I’ll be homeward bound in time.

Bind me not to the pasture, chain me not to the plow,
Set me free to find my calling and I’ll return to you somehow.

If you find it’s me you’re missing, if you’re hoping I’ll return,
To your thoughts I’ll soon be list’ning; in the road I’ll stop and turn,
Then the wind will set me racing as my journey nears its end,
And the path I’ll be retracing when I’m homeward bound again.

Bind me not to the pasture, chain me not to the plow,
Set me free to find my calling and I’ll return to you somehow.

In the quiet misty morning when the moon has gone to bed,
When the sparrows stop their singing, I’ll be homeward bound again.

Here’s a fine video performance by the Brigham Young University student ensemble Vocal Point, accompanied by the All-American Boys Chorus:

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Or perhaps instead of an all-male chorus, you’d prefer the all-female Ballard High School Treble Choir from Seattle:

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Or, if you’d like a more Classical rendition, try this resonant recording from the great Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, produced by Deutsche Grammophon:

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Or maybe best of all — and an inspiration for any very young singers you may have in your home academy — here’s a 2015 performance by the Texas Children’s Choir in San Antonio:

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Maybe someday we’ll have a great big River Houses homeschool choir and a “Homeward Bound” version of our very own. 🎼

What wonderful words and music have you discovered in your homeschool this week? 😊

❡ I’ll be homeward bound in time: 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. 😊

❡ Here, said the year: This post is one of our regular homeschool poems-of-the-week. Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us as we visit forty-eight of our favorite friends.

🗓 LIBRARY LESSONS: What Would a Perfect Calendar Look Like?

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-utopian-calendar 😊

We love calendars here at the River Houses, and we love books and libraries too, so what could be better than a proposal for a perfect calendar, courtesy of the Library of Congress?

People have been trying to “reform” the world’s many date-keeping systems ever since date-keeping began. Lunar calendars, solar calendars, Julian calendars, Gregorian calendars, local calendars, perpetual calendars, leap years, leap seconds, extra days — the quest seems endless.

Joseph Collins’ “Proposed Utopian Calendar,” 1939. (Image: Library of Congress.)

Here’s one person’s vision for a perfect calendar — Joseph Collins’ “Proposed Utopian Calendar” from 1939, now scanned and available from the Library of Congress, complete with notes for teachers (like you!) on how to use this primary source to get students thinking about calendars and history:

Collins was disturbed by the fact that the months didn’t all have the same number of days, and that the same date didn’t always fall on the same day of the week. So he devised a complex mathematical system to correct for these problems — and thanks to the Library’s educational programs you can read his proposal in his own words, explore his new calendar diagram, and use them to sharpen your students’ thinking skills. After your students have spent some time contemplating Collins’ calendar, challenge them to come up with one of their own. Can there ever be such a thing as a perfect calendar? If so, why don’t we use it? If not, why not?

What educational discoveries have you made at your library lately? 😊

❡ 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 (riverhouses.org) has links to several important 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 free weekly mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get more great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 📚