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🇸🇳 WEEKLY WORLD HERITAGE: The Saloum Delta in Senegal

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

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 River Houses academic year, 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. 📚

📏 HAPPY WORLD METROLOGY DAY!

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

It’s World Metrology Day! On this day in 1875, the meter was adopted as the standard for the metric system of measurement, and the rest is history. 📏

World Metrology Day poster, 2019. (Image: worldmetrologyday.org.)

Can your students recognize all the fundamental measurement units (and their abbreviations) shown in the poster? They are the basis for the International System of Units (SI), commonly called the metric system.

Take a look at just a few of the places that scientific and engineering measurements interact with your life every day:

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You can download and print your own copy of the World Metrology Day poster at worldmetrologyday.org — it’s just the thing for your homeschool bulletin board!

What scientific measurements have you taken in your homeschool this week? 😊

❡ 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 19 May 2019

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-05-19 😊

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 Colorado, and our countries are San Marino 🇸🇲, São Tomé and Príncipe 🇸🇹, Saudi Arabia 🇸🇦, and Senegal 🇸🇳. (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 — an increasingly good time for moon watching! 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).

🗓 TODAY (Sunday, 19 May) — Today is the 139th day of 2019; there are 226 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). ⬩ Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin (1786–1847) set out from Greenhithe, England, on this day in 1845, hoping to discover and chart the Northwest Passage. Franklin and his ships were never heard from again. The Franklin expedition’s disappearance was one of the great nautical mysteries of the nineteenth century. ⚓

Monday (20 May) — Shakespeare’s sonnets were first published on this day in London in 1609, possibly without his permission. 🖋 And today is the birthday of the great philosopher of liberty John Stuart Mill (1806–1873). 📖 And not only that, it’s also World Metrology Day! 📏

Tuesday (21 May) — Today the birthday of the great German artist Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). 🎨 And the American Red Cross was established in Washington on this day in 1881 by Clara Barton (1821–1912). 👩‍⚕️

Wednesday (22 May) — Today is the birthday of the famous American impressionist painter Mary Cassatt (1844–1926). 🎨 It’s also the birthday of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930), the inventor of the inimitable Sherlock Holmes. 🔎 Our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the fourth week of May is Marta Keen’s “Homeward Bound,” which we hope will one day become the River Houses’ annual graduation anthem. Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us throughout the year.

Thursday (23 May) — Today is the birthday of the great Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), who devised the system of species nomenclature that is still in use today in the biological sciences by all of us members of Homo sapiens. 🐟 🐢 🐳 🐒 🐝 🐪 🐞 🐌 🦋 🦉

Friday (24 May) — Today is the birthday of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom (1819–1901), who gave her name to an entire historical era. You can read more about Victoria and the Victorians on page 348 in your homeschool history encyclopedia (riverhouses.org/books). 👑 And on this day in 1844, Samuel F.B. Morse sent the message “What hath God wrought!” from the U.S. Capitol building to his assistant in Baltimore, thirty-five miles away, instantly, thereby inaugurating the first commercial telegraph line between two U.S. cities. ⚡️

Saturday (25 May) — Today is the birthday of the great American poet, essayist, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). 🖋 And on this day in 1977, the first Star Wars movie was released! 🚀

Sunday (26 May) — It’s National Paper Airplane Day! That’s surely something to be celebrated in every homeschool. ✈️

🥂 YOUR WEEKLY TOAST: “May our endeavors be always successful when engaged under the banner of justice.”

❡ 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: Senegal is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Casamance River, which flows westward through southern Senegal into the Atlantic Ocean. You can chart its course in your recommended homeschool atlas (riverhouses.org/books), and you can read more about it in the Casamance River entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

The Casamance River in southern Senegal. (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: Colorado, San Marino, Senegal, and More

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

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:

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    Colorado State Quarter
    COLORADO (the 38th state, 1 August 1876) — The Centennial State. Capital: Denver. Colorado can be found on page 566 in your almanac and on plates 38 and 142 in your atlas. Name origin: “From Spanish for ‘red,’ first applied to Colorado River” (almanac page 430). State bird: Lark Bunting (bird guide page 498). Website: www.colorado.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:

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. 🌎

🇨🇦 HOMESCHOOL MUSIC & HISTORY: “To find the hand of Franklin”

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

Cultural understanding grows from the storehouse of facts and experiences that you impart to your students as you teach them from day to day. To appreciate a complex and beautiful piece of art or literature or music, your students must already know a great deal about the world — names, places, people, and events, that may seem at first to be disconnected.

This post is about a piece of music, but it begins with an anniversary. On this day in 1845, one of the most famous sailing voyages of the nineteenth century began — and with it, one of that century’s greatest mysteries.

On the 19th of May in 1845, British admiral Sir John Franklin sailed from Greenhithe in England with two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, in the hopes of discovering the Northwest Passage, the postulated northern route from the Davis Strait off the coast of Greenland to the Beaufort Sea above Alaska that would eliminate the need to sail all the way around the tip of South America (“around the Horn”) to get to the Far East. Franklin and his expedition, 149 men in all, disappeared, and were never heard from again.

“HMS Erebus in the Ice” by Francois Etienne Musin (1846). (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

You could develop an entire homeschool curriculum based on the Franklin expedition and the search for the Northwest Passage. Many additional ships were sent in search of Franklin, and some did find scraps of evidence. Interviews with Inuit hunters turned up reports of starving men seen years before who appeared to be shipwreck survivors. But the ships themselves and what happened to them remained a mystery.

Or at least it did until just recently. For a number of years the Canadian national park service has been conducting research on the fate of the Franklin expedition, and in 2014, in a remarkable feat of underwater archeology, they discovered HMS Erebus, almost completely intact, resting on the sea floor near King William Island in Nunavut (Northwest Territories). Two years later, in 2016, they discovered HMS Terror about 50 miles farther north. You can read all about these remarkable discoveries on the Parks Canada website:

But this post is about a piece of music.

The great Canadian folk singer Stan Rogers, who died tragically in an airplane fire in 1983, wrote a small masterpiece called “Northwest Passage” that has become a kind of second national anthem for Canada. It tells the story of a modern traveler driving along well-paved highways in the far north, and imagining the explorers who went before him.

Here’s the trailer for a documentary film on Rogers’ life and art, “One Warm Line,” that features this song. With the historical background above, the names and places and events, you’ll be able to appreciate its rich cultural and historical context and understand what a real gem it is:

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And here’s a studio recording of the full song:

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Why not sit down this week with your students and have a special lesson in art, culture, geography, and history — an example of homeschooling at its best. Take out your homeschool atlas (riverhouses.org/books), and listen to Stan Rogers, and follow the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea.

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

❡ Stay in the loop: This is one of our occasional Homeschool Arts & Music 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. 🗞

🌕 RESEARCH PROJECTS for Homeschool Students – May 2019

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For images and links, click to: riverhouses.org/lunar-2019-05 😊

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 an outline of the idea, along with a list of 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:

Browse through that big 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 on its way to becoming an international research powerhouse. 🔬 🔭 🖥 🦋 🔍 ⚗️ ⛏ 📖 🌲 😊

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 achievements.

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’ve been tracking the birds in a small riverside park near me (eBird hotspot L6926932), and have now contributed a total of 470 checklists (daily observation reports) for this locality. When all the checklists are combined you can really get a sense of the seasonal distribution and migration patterns for the year.

You can start keeping a similar 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 interesting results.) You can even add photos and sound recordings to your reports if you wish. Just pay a visit to the eBird website (ebird.org) and start exploring.

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 to three of these: (1) the SETI@Home project, sponsored by the University of California, which searches for extraterrestrial intelligence (really!); (2) the Einstein@Home project, which studies neutron stars; and (3) the MilkyWay@Home project, which studies the history and structure of our galaxy.

I’ve created River Houses team pages for each of these projects (Einstein@Home team, MilkyWay@Home team, SETI@Home team). Once your computer is signed up to participate you can join one of these teams and also print “certificates of computation” that show how much data you’ve individually analyzed and how much your team has analyzed — they’re just the thing for your homeschool bulletin board. 😊

And here’s another level of skill development for your high-school (or even advanced middle-school) students: once you’ve processed a few weeks or months of data, you can start graphing your contributions. Using Google Sheets, I’ve set up a simple chart of River Houses team results, and this is what it looks like:

That’s just a simple graphing exercise — it’s something that we can refine, develop, and expand in the future. (And your students can develop their own individual charts as well.)

The Internet provides exceptional opportunities for homeschool students to participate in real research projects in a variety of scientific and scholarly fields, something that would have been impossible only a few years ago. Pay a visit to our Lunar Society page to read about many more projects that your family can join.

What scholarly and scientific discoveries have you made in your homeschool this month? 😊

❡ The friends who made the future: 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 (riverhouses.org/books) includes an excellent bird guide that would serve your family well. And for any astronomical projects you may join, our recommended star atlas 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: The Internet provides exceptional opportunities for homeschool students to participate in real research projects in a variety of scientific and scholarly fields, something that would have been impossible only a few years ago. Pay a visit to our Lunar Society page (riverhouses.org/lunar) to read about many more projects that your family can join. 🔬 🔭 🖥 🦋 🔍 🌻 ⚗️ ✒️ 📖 🌲 😊

🇬🇷 HOMESCHOOL HISTORY: The Antikythera Mechanism

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

One of the most remarkable objects the ancient world ever produced, the Antikythera mechanism, was discovered on this day in 1902 by archaeologist Valerios Stais. Or it might be more accurate to say it was “recognized,” since it had been hauled up a year before by sponge divers exploring a first-century B.C. wreck off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera.

The largest surviving fragment of the Antikythera mechanism. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

Suppose you were excavating a military encampment from the time of the American Civil War, and among the debris you found a laptop computer. That’s the type of comparison that’s often made for the Antikythera mechanism. A complex astronomical computer made of dozens of precisely engineered interlocking gears that could predict the movements of the sun, the moon, and the planets over centuries, the Antikythera mechanism is unlike any other known ancient object. Nothing of equivalent complexity would be produced again in Europe for more than a thousand years.

If you’re studying ancient history in your homeschool this month, here’s an excellent NOVA documentary on the Antikythera mechanism that’s well worth watching with your students:

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What historical discoveries have you made in your homeschool this week? 😊

❡ Come, here’s the map: If you turn to plate 72 in your recommended homeschool atlas (riverhouses.org/books) you’ll be able to locate the island of Antikythera and many of the other places mentioned in the documentary above.

❡ 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. 🗞

🐦 NATURE NOTES: Record Bird Songs, Win Valuable Prizes!

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

May is Bird Migration Month in the River Houses, so this month, why not try recording some bird songs on your smartphone. If you do a good job, you might win some cool educational prizes.

Cornell University is famous around the world for its Library of Natural Sounds, a unique collection of recordings of birds, mammals, insects, and all kinds of other creatures that make noises in nature. The first recording made for that collection, a singing Song Sparrow, was captured 90 years ago this month.

In honor of this grand audio anniversary, Cornell is inviting people to record a bird song this coming week, between 18–26 May 2019, and submit it online. All submissions will be entered into a drawing, and if your recording is selected as a winner, you could receive a set of professional sound recording equipment, a subscription to their online bird encyclopedia, or a $100 certificate for online nature classes. You can check on all the details and get some sound recording tips here:

Surely this is something a talented homeschool student should win, yes? I certainly think so!

What ornithological 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: 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, and birds can be found just about anywhere at any season of the year. Why not track your own homeschool bird observations on the free eBird website, also 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. 😊

🖋 WONDERFUL WORDS: Robert Frost’s “Birches”

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It’s the season to get outside and gain experience. In order to understand advanced, abstract ideas like metaphor, young people first have to accumulate a good deal of non-metaphorical experience. You can’t see how one thing can stand for another until you’ve experienced the one thing in the first place.

Go outside and find some birch trees this lovely spring week and read this poem aloud as you tug on their branches — it’s our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the third week of May, from Robert Frost:

Birches

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust —
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows —
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Unlike many of Frost’s tightly structured metrical poems, this is a looser, more prosy, narrative work (although ten- and eleven-syllable lines do occur in high frequency). Let’s see how it sounds when Frost himself reads it:

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It’s always good to hear poets read their own poems, since they know them best, but I’ll make an unpopular confession here: I don’t think Frost is always the best reader. In general, he reads too fast, and I suspect that by the latter part of his life he had given so many public readings that he had gotten in the habit of just zipping along in a way that can make it hard to follow the story-line on first hearing.

“Swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay / As ice-storms do.” (Image: betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com.)

But a good poem, like “Birches,” deserves many readings and hearings, fast and slow, at all seasons of the year. This season, give it a first reading in your homeschool, and go out and bend some branches.

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

❡ So was I once myself a swinger of birches: 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. 😊

❡ Explore more: The Poetry Foundation’s website includes biographical notes and examples of the work of many important poets (including Robert Frost) that are suitable for high school students and homeschool teachers.

❡ 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.

🇰🇳 WEEKLY WORLD HERITAGE: Brimstone Hill Fortress National Park in Saint Kitts and Nevis

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

The island nation of Saint Kitts and Nevis in the West Indies is one of our homeschool countries-of-the-week, so why not spend a few minutes today learning about one of Saint Kitts’ World Heritage Sites: Brimstone Hill Fortress National Park.

Remains of historic military fortifications at Brimstone Hill Fortress National Park, island of St. Kitts, West Indies. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

The island of St. Kitts, also known as St. Christopher, is one of the two principal islands that make up the West Indian nation of Saint Kitts and Nevis. As with many other West Indian islands, control of St. Kitts was long contested between the French and British. Brimstone Hill was a British fortress built to guard the island from French incursions.

“Brimstone Hill Fortress National Park is an outstanding, well-preserved example of 17th- and 18th-century military architecture in a Caribbean context. Designed by the British and built by African slave labour, the fortress is testimony to European colonial expansion, the African slave trade and the emergence of new societies in the Caribbean.“ (UNESCO World Heritage Centre #910)

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. 🌎