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🗓 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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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. 🗞