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💰 🏞 AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL: San Antonio Missions National Park

by Bob O'Hara

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-san-antonio-quarter

Calling all homeschool historians, geographers, artists, and treasure hunters! Here’s something new for you to search for this month: the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park “America the Beautiful” quarter from the U.S. Mint:

[Click for image: riverhouses.org/2019-san-antonio-quarter]

The San Antonio Missions National Historical Park “America the Beautiful” quarter, 2019. (Image: U.S. Mint.)

If you’re looking for a fun and easy way to include some interesting geographical and historical facts in your homeschool schedule (as well as a little treasure hunting), you can’t do better than to keep an eye on the “America the Beautiful” quarters series. This commemorative series began in 2010 and each year five new designs are issued featuring national parks and other historic sites in the U.S. states and territories.

The latest quarter commemorates the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park in Texas, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it has just gone into circulation:

“The San Antonio Missions were among the largest concentrations of Spanish missions in North America, established in the 1700s, and helped create the foundation for the City of San Antonio, TX. The construction of aqueducts and irrigation canals (acequias) brought water to the missions sustaining farming and ranching. The missions’ toolmaking, carpentry, looming, spinning, and masonry also contributed to the community’s ability to be self-sustaining.“ (U.S. Mint)

The Mint has a remarkably comprehensive set of free lesson plans available for the whole America the Beautiful series — you could make quite an American history course out of them. And the Mint also has a very nice simple album for this series (amzn.to/2D2A3dO) — just the thing to get some educational treasure hunting under way.

(And next up, if you want to look ahead: a quarter for the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho, scheduled for November.)

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

❡ Come, here’s the map: The America the Beautiful quarters are a great tool for teaching about geography. Locate each park and each historic site in your homeschool atlas (riverhouses.org/books), and spread out your whole collection on atlas plate 35, the map of the entire United States. 🇺🇸

❡ Make it a tradition: Why not pick up an old roll of circulated quarters at your local grocery store or bank each week and invite your students to go through it around the kitchen table. A whole world of historical and geographical discovery awaits them. 💰

❡ Cabinets of wonder: This is one of our occasional posts on the educational value of collections and collecting for homeschoolers. 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. 🔎

🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 25 August 2019

by Bob O'Hara

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-08-25

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 HERCULES TERM, our Summer Term in the River Houses, and the last week of the 2018–2019 River Houses year. CYGNUS TERM and the new 2019–2020 school year begin on Sunday, the 1st of September!

🌎 OUR “STATE” OF THE WEEK, wrapping up our year-long tour, is the planet Earth itself, and our “COUNTRIES” are the Solar System and the Universe beyond! (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 waning crescent — a good time for stargazing! You can dial up this week’s constellations and explore the moon’s features with your homeschool star atlas and world atlas, and you can learn many more stellar and lunar facts on pages 342–357 in your almanac (riverhouses.org/books).

🗓 TODAY (Sunday, 25 August) — Today is the 237th day of 2019; there are 127 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). 📚 On this second day of the burning of Washington in 1814, the U.S. Treasury, the Library of Congress, and other public buildings were destroyed by British Troops. 🇬🇧⚔️🇺🇸 Today is also the birthday of American illustrator Walt Kelly (1913–1973), the creator of the comic strip Pogo. 🎨 And it’s also the birthday of the great American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990). 🎵

Monday (26 August) — Today is the birthday of one of the founders of modern chemistry, the great French scientist Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794), who coined the names “oxygen” and “hydrogen.” ⚗️

Tuesday (27 August) — One of the largest volcanic eruptions in recorded history took place on this day in 1883 in the Krakatoa archipelago in Indonesia. Over the course of the previous day an ash cloud seventeen miles high had developed over the islands, and on the 27th four massive explosions occurred, the largest of which was heard 3000 miles away in the Indian Ocean. The ash injected into the atmosphere by the Krakatoa eruption produced vivid sunsets all around the world for many months. 🌋

Wednesday (28 August) — Today is the birthday of the American naturalist and artist Roger Tory Peterson (1908–1996), whose series of compact field guides helped to make amateur bird study popular around the world. 🦆 And on this day in 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. 🕊

Thursday (29 August) — Today is the birthday of the great philosopher of liberty John Locke (1632–1704), whose works influenced the framing of the American system of government. 📖

Friday (30 August) — Today is the birthday of English novelist Mary Shelley (1797–1851), the author of Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). 🌭🍺 It’s also the birthday of baseball great Ted Williams (1918–2002), the last major league player to bat over .400 in a season (1941). ⚾️

Saturday (31 August) — Italian educator and physician Maria Montessori was born on this day in 1870. Her approach to early childhood education remains popular in homeschools as well as in public and private schools around the world today. 👩🏼‍🏫

The 2019–2020 River Houses Year Begins. Let the river run!

Sunday (1 September) — Welcome to a New River Houses Year! 🎉 For this first week of September, this first week of Cygnus Term, and this first week of the 2019–2020 River Houses year, our homeschool poem-of-the-week will be our traditional extract from Jonathan Swift’s adaptation of the Roman poet Horace (65–8 B.C.): “A handsome house to lodge a friend, / A river at my garden’s end.” 📜 Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us throughout the 2019–2020 homeschool year. 😊

🥂 OUR WEEKLY TOAST, for the old school year just ending and the new school year about to begin, is a new-year wish that is probably modern but is often attributed (like many other wise sayings) to Benjamin Franklin: “Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man.”

❡ 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: The Universe is our “country” of the week for this last week of the River Houses year, so our Weekly World River is the constellation Eridanus, the Great River of the Heavens. You can chart its course in the astronomical section of your recommended homeschool atlas (riverhouses.org/books), and you can read more about it in the comprehensive Eridanus entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

The constellation Eridanus, the Great River of the Heavens, flowing from beside the feet of Orion (upper left) down below the celestial equator into the southern hemisphere. (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, 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: The Earth, the Solar System, and Beyond

by Bob O'Hara

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

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’ve spent the entire past school year completing our States & Countries review, and this week we conclude with the whole Earth itself and the wonderful Universe beyond:

  • 🌎 THE EARTH — The Blue Planet, Third Rock from the Sun. Capitals: 196 of them, listed here over the entire past year. The Earth as a whole can be found on plates 3–25 in your recommended homeschool atlas (riverhouses.org/books) — don’t miss the opportunity to go through that wonderful set of thematic maps with your students, covering everything from topography to population to vegetation to climate to transportation to Internet connectivity. Your almanac, too, has facts and figures about the physical Earth on pages 355–357 and in many other locations throughout the volume.

A new River Houses tour of the world will begin next week with the new school year! Print out your own States & Countries Calendar on our main calendar page (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us. 😊

❡ Little lessons: You can teach a hundred little lessons with the states-of-the-week that we post each Sunday all through the year, 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.

And now that you’ve spent a year touring everything on the entire Earth 😲, the whole rest of the Universe awaits you!

  • 🌌 THE UNIVERSE is beautifully illustrated in your recommended homeschool atlas (riverhouses.org/books) on plates 120–127. You’ll find star-maps for the northern and southern hemispheres, detailed maps of the moon and Mars, a beautiful chart of the solar system and all the planets, and two amazing illustrations of the Milky Way and the scope of everything that is known. Those few plates are enough to teach an entire year of homeschool astronomy — don’t miss the opportunity to share them with your young scholars today. 🔭

We hope you’ve enjoyed our geographical explorations over the 2018–2019 River Houses year. What grand geographical discoveries will you be making in the wonderful homeschool year ahead? 😊

❡ 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 an educational tour of the United States and the whole world over the course of the coming 2019–2020 homeschool year. 🇺🇸 🌎 🌌

🦅 NATURE NOTES: The Beginning of Fall Migration

by Horace the Otter 🦦

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

It may still feel like summer, but the signs of approaching autumn are all around. Have your students seen them? They vary from region to region, but if you keep your eyes open they’re unmistakeable.

In my part of the world, one of the first signs of fall is the migration of Common Nighthawks high overhead, hawking their way to the south.

[For images, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-nighthawks]

Nighthawks are not hawks — they belong to the goatsucker family along with Whip-poor-wills and Chuck-will’s-widows (see page 84 in your homeschool bird guide for a gallery of goatsuckers). Although they are not hawks, they do hawk — for insects in flight. Their obligatory insectivorous habit tends to make them early migrants, because if they get caught in a cold snap that kills off their flying food supply, they could themselves starve.

Common Nighthawks are daytime (or evening) migrants, and they often travel in groups, so they’re a conspicuous sign of fall for people who keep their eyes on the sky. Many smaller songbirds, however, migrate at night, and their direct movements are generally invisible to the ordinary observer. Those movements aren’t invisible to radar, however, and one of the most remarkable real-time science websites you can share with the young naturalists in your household is the BirdCast.info site sponsored by Cornell University:

BirdCast is a bird-migration forecasting and monitoring service that documents the nightly migratory movements of millions birds across the United States hour by hour. It includes both forecasts, just like weather forecasts — how heavy is the nightly migration expected to be over the next three days — as well as real-time radar reports, beginning at sunset on the east coast and continuing through the night across the country, tracking the actual volume of bird traffic in the air.

Sample real-time radar image of migrating birds across the United States in May 2019. Visit the BirdCast website for current forecasts and tracking during the spring and fall. (Image: birdcast.info.)

We’ll have more nature notes to follow as the season progresses. Keep your eyes on the sky. 👓

What signs of fall have you seen in your homeschool this week? 😊

❡ 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 great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 😊

🖋 🏡 ENVOY: A Living River by the Door

by Bob O'Hara

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

The River Houses year is coming to a close and this is our very last homeschool poem-of-the-week for 2018–2019. We hope you and your students have enjoyed visiting with forty-eight of our favorite friends. 😊 The new school year will begin in a few days, but in the mean time, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) gives the departing year a perfect River Houses send-off:

Envoy

Go, little book, and wish to all
Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall,
A bin of wine, a spice of wit,
A house with lawns enclosing it,
A living river by the door,
A nightingale in the sycamore!

“Envoy” (or its French form, “Envoi”) is a generic title, not a specific one — like “Appendix” or “Afterword.” An “Envoy” in the poetic sense is a note of departure: a short verse that appears at the end of a longer work and that wraps up the whole and sends readers on their way.

Homeschooling, Robert Louis Stevenson style: illustration by Dorothy O’Reilly from a 1908 edition of A Child’s Garden of Verses. (Image: Library of Congress via the Internet Archive.)

As this school year comes to a close, our little blog wishes all our homeschool readers, by way of envoy, “Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall, / A bin of wine, a spice of wit, / A house with lawns enclosing it, / A living river by the door, / A nightingale in the sycamore!”

What wonderful words will you and your students discover in the homeschool year ahead? 😊

❡ A living river by the door: 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 Louis Stevenson) 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: A (Nearly) Free World Heritage Wall Map

by Bob O'Hara

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

Every Wednesday we’ve been paying a homeschool visit to a World Heritage Site, drawn from one of our countries-of-the-week. The 2018–2019 River Houses year is coming to a close (and the 2019–2020 year will begin next month), so we’re going to wrap up our current grand World Heritage tour by inviting you to order a copy of the lovely full-color World Heritage Map that’s available from UNESCO for just the price of shipping (US$3.00).

Front of World Heritage Map, 31 × 20 inches. (Image: UNESCO World Heritage Centre.)

I ordered my own copy this week and will give you a report when it arrives. It sounds like just the thing for your homeschool bulletin board, and it can double as a general-purpose world wall map as well:

“This large format full-colour map features World Heritage sites and brief explanations of the World Heritage Convention and the World Heritage conservation programmes. It is available in English, French and Spanish, [and has] superb photos of World Heritage sites with explanatory captions. The dimensions of the map are 78 cm by 50 cm (31 in. by 20 in.).“ (UNESCO World Heritage Centre)

Back of World Heritage Map showing complete list of sites. (Image: UNESCO World Heritage Centre.)

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, and you can order your copy of the World Heritage Map right here:

We’ll be starting up a new World Heritage tour next month as the new River Houses year begins. Download a copy of our printable World Heritage Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us!

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. For an ideal little lesson, just write the name of the Weekly World Heritage Site on your homeschool bulletin board, find its location in your atlas, read UNESCO’s one-paragraph description aloud, look at a picture or two, and you’re done. Over the course of the year, without even realizing it, your students will absorb a wealth of new historical, geographical, and cultural information. 🗺

❡ 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. 🌎

🚀 WORK ON A NASA PROJECT at the National Archives

by Bob O'Hara

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

If you have high-school homeschoolers with a real interest in NASA and space exploration, here’s a great academic project they can contribute to at the National Archives.

The Citizen Archivist Program is looking for people to tag and document NASA film footage relating to astronauts and space exploration:

“Within the archival film holdings from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration at the National Archives, you will find moving images relating to NASA space flight programs, including Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and the joint United States–Soviet Union program Apollo-Soyuz.

“This incredible series of films includes footage of rigorous training exercises, mock run-throughs, launches, parachute and spacecraft recovery, and other astronaut activities, all detailing the meticulous steps involved in mission preparation and space exploration.

“Help tag descriptive details within these NASA films relating to space flight programs. You can tag names of astronauts, locations, launches, and even machinery and equipment shown within each film. Every tag helps makes these records more searchable.“ (National Archives, Citizen Archivist Program)

Your students would learn a lot about real history — not textbook history — from working on a project like this, and they would gain a host of valuable skills in research and organization. (And their participation would probably look good on a homeschool transcript for college, too!) Learn more about this project and others on the Citizen Archivist missions page:

The Internet provides exceptional opportunities for homeschool students to participate in real research projects like this one 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? 😊

❡ Whether they work together or apart: This is one of our regular Lunar Society Bulletins about the many cooperative research projects we recommend to homeschool students. 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 18 August 2019

by Bob O'Hara

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-08-18

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 “STATES” OF THE WEEK are the special U.S. Territories of American Samoa 🇦🇸, Guam 🇬🇺, the Northern Mariana Islands 🇲🇵, Puerto Rico 🇵🇷, the U.S. Virgin Islands 🇻🇮, and the District of Columbia, and our “COUNTRIES” are the five oceans of the world. (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, and you can learn many more stellar and lunar facts on pages 342–357 in your almanac (riverhouses.org/books).

🗓 TODAY (Sunday, 18 August) — Today is the 230th day of 2019; there are 135 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). 📚 On this day in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing women the right to vote, was ratified. ☑️

Monday (19 August) — On this day in 1812, during the War of 1812, the American frigate U.S.S. Constitution defeated Great Britain’s H.M.S. Guerriere off the coast of Nova Scotia and earned the nickname “Old Ironsides.” Old Ironsides is today the oldest commissioned warship in the U.S. Navy and you can pay her a visit any day you like in the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston. ⚓️ And speaking of ships, today is also the birthday of Gene Roddenberry (1921–1991), the creator of Star Trek! 🖖

Tuesday (20 August) — On this day in 1975, NASA launched the Viking 1 Mars probe. Viking 1 became the first successful Mars lander and remained in operation for more than six years. (An earlier probe, the Soviet Union’s Mars 3, did successfully land on Mars in 1971, but it transmitted for only 14 seconds.) 🚀 Today is also the birthday of the American writer H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), author of many creepy (but popular) horror stories. 🙀

Wednesday (21 August) — On this day in 1959, Hawaii became the 50th state of the Union. 🇺🇸 The Great American Solar Eclipse of 2017 took place on this day just two years ago — perhaps you saw it! 🌏 🌑 🌞

Thursday (22 August) — The English Civil War between the King and Parliament began on this day in 1642 when Charles I raised the royal standard at Nottingham. 👑 Today is also the birthday of famed French pianist and composer Claude Debussy (1862–1918). 🎹 And our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the final week of August, the last week of the 2018–2019 River Houses year, is “Envoy,” a cheerful farewell wish for happy houses and living waters from Robert Louis Stevenson. 🏡 Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us throughout the year.

Friday (23 August) — On this day in 1775, four months after Lexington and Concord, and two months after Bunker Hill, King George III formally proclaimed the American colonies to be in a state of “open and avowed rebellion.” ⚔️

Saturday (24 August) — Although there is some debate among scholars, this is generally believed to be the day on which Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79, burying the ancient Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. 🌋 And on this day in 1814, during the War of 1812, British troops captured the city of Washington and burned the White House and the U.S. Capitol. 🇬🇧⚔️🇺🇸

Sunday (25 August) — On the second day of the burning of Washington in 1814, the U.S. Treasury, the Library of Congress, and other public buildings were destroyed by British Troops. 🇬🇧⚔️🇺🇸 Today is also the birthday of American illustrator Walt Kelly (1913–1973), the creator of the comic strip Pogo. 🎨 And it’s also the birthday of the great American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990). 🎵

🥂 OUR WEEKLY TOAST: “May we choose virtue and avoid vice.”

❡ 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: Last week we completed our annual tour of the countries of the world (from which we had been selecting our Weekly World Rivers), so it is only fitting this week that we look to the source of them all. The ancient Greeks believed that the whole world (as they knew it) was encircled by a great flowing river, and they personified this universal river as the god Okeanos (Oceanus, Ocean). Okeanos was one of the Titans, a child of Ouranos (Uranus, Heaven) and Gaia (Terra, Earth), and with his sister-wife Tethys, Okeanos fathered all the rivers of the world. You can read much more about this father of the waters in the comprehensive Okeanos/Oceanus entry in Wikipedia, or perhaps on your next visit to your local library. Our Weekly World River for this next-to-last week of the River Houses year is therefore the World River, Okeanos.

[Oceanus and Tethys]
The ancient Greek god Okeanos (Ὠκεανός), father of all the rivers, and his wife Tethys. (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, 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: U.S. Territories, World Oceans, and More

by Bob O'Hara

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

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 started our tour at the beginning of the River Houses year in September and are now approaching the end. We’ve completed all the regular states — it’s convenient to have 50 states to cover in a 52-week year! — so we’ll wind up our United States survey with the several small U.S. Territories and Possessions that are scattered around the globe. You can find them all listed in your almanac beginning on page 590:

Another important United States “territory” is our federal city, the District of Columbia, formed originally from parts of Maryland and Virginia, but by design not part of any state:

  • 🇺🇸 THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA along the Potomac River between Maryland and Virginia. Population: 693,972. Capital: Washington. Official bird: Wood Thrush (bird guide page 412). Website: dc.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.

And since we’ve now finished up the world’s land areas — the nation-states and the non-national continent of Antarctica — this week we’ll cover what is actually the largest part of the earth’s surface: the oceans. The world’s five oceans, in order of size, with links to their Wikipedia pages, are:

  • 🌊 THE PACIFIC OCEAN between the eastern hemisphere to the west, and the western hemisphere to the east. Area: 60,060,893 sq. mi. Average depth: 14,040 ft.
  • 🌊 THE ATLANTIC OCEAN between the western hemisphere to the west, and the eastern hemisphere to the east. Area: 29,637,974 sq. mi. Average depth: 11,810 ft.
  • 🌊 THE INDIAN OCEAN south of the continent of Asia. Area: 26,469,620 sq. mi. Average depth: 12,800 ft.
  • 🌊 THE SOUTHERN OCEAN surrounding the continent of Antarctica. Area: 7,848,299 sq. mi. Average depth: 14,450 ft.
  • ❄️ THE ARCTIC OCEAN covering the north polar region. Area: 5,427,052 sq. mi. Average depth: 4,300 ft.

A wealth of information and many beautiful maps of the world’s oceans can be found in your current almanac and homeschool atlas as well (riverhouses.org/books).

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

❡ 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. 🇺🇸 🌎

🔭 🌌 ASTRONOMY PICTURE OF THE DAY: Vega and the Milky Way

by Bob O'Hara

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

One of the best educational astronomy sites you and your homeschoolers can follow online is NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day site (apod.nasa.gov). For several years they’ve been posting a daily high-quality astronomy image with a paragraph or two of explanation that outlines what the image represents. It’s a great five-minute astronomy lesson that you can easily incorporate into your homeschool schedule.

You can also search back through the APOD archives to find pictures on topics that may interest you. Here in the River Houses our Great Star for the month of August is Vega, and the Perseid meteor shower just passed a few days ago, so what better image could we look up on APOD than this beautiful photo from August 2008 of the Milky Way with a Perseid streaking across it, and with Vega and its constellation Lyra, lying on its side, shining off to the right.

Perseid meteor trail with Vega and the Milky Way. (Image: Wally Pacholka via apod.nasa.gov.)

The APOD editors helpfully explain what we’re looking at:

“This bright and colorful meteor flashed through [the] early morning skies, part of the annual Perseid Meteor Shower. The lovely image is one of over 350 frames captured on August 12 [2008] from the Joshua Tree National Park, in California, USA. Dust from comet Swift–Tuttle is responsible for the Perseids, creating the northern hemisphere’s regular summer sky show. The comet dust is vaporized as it enters the atmosphere at upwards of 60 kilometers per second, producing visible trails that begin at altitudes of around 100 kilometers. Of course, the trails point back to a radiant point in the constellation Perseus, giving the meteor shower its name. Recorded after moonset, the starry background features the bright star Vega on the right. Extending below the western horizon is the faint band of the northern Milky Way.“ (apod.nasa.gov)

Why not add apod.nasa.gov to your list of homeschool science bookmarks and pay it a visit whenever the stargazing spirit strikes you. 🔭

What stellar spectacles are you studying in your homeschool this week? 😊

❡ Watchers of the skies: This is one of our regular Homeschool Astronomy 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. 🗞

🖋 🌞 WONDERFUL WORDS: “Poor, middle-agèd summer!”

by Bob O'Hara

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

Summer is showing its age and the River Houses year is winding down — late August is upon us. The Song Sparrows and Yellow Warblers in my neighborhood have gone quiet, and the thistles and goldenrod are filling up the fields and riverbanks. There can surely be no better homeschool poem-of-the-week for us at this seasonal moment than the lovely sonnet “August” by Helen Hunt Jackson:

August

Silence again. The glorious symphony
Hath need of pause and interval of peace.
Some subtle signal bids all sweet sounds cease,
Save hum of insects’ aimless industry.
Pathetic, summer seeks by blazonry
Of color to conceal her swift decrease.
Weak subterfuge! Each mocking day doth fleece
A blossom and lay bare her poverty.
Poor, middle-agèd summer! Vain this show!
Whole fields of golden-rod cannot offset
One meadow with a single violet;
And well the singing thrush and lily know,
Spite of all artifice which her regret
Can deck in splendid guise, their time to go!

Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885) is not well remembered now, but she was very popular and widely read in her day. Born Helen Fiske in Amherst, Massachusetts, she was a childhood friend of Emily Dickinson, and she wrote for many leading magazines of the era, including The Atlantic, still in publication, where this poem first appeared in August 1876.

“Whole [late-summer] fields of golden-rod cannot offset / One [spring] meadow with a single violet.” (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

When you introduce your students to a new poem, especially one in a traditional form, take your time, and don’t worry about “getting” everything right away. A good poem is a friend for life, and as with any friend, it takes several meetings to get acquainted. Before you even start to think about “meaning,” take a look at the poem’s structure. “August” is a sonnet. Sonnets usually have fourteen lines that are grouped into either an octet of eight and a sestet of six (a Petrarchan sonnet), or into four quatrains of four and a couplet of two (a Shakespearean sonnet). I’d say “August” is closer to the Petrarchan type, although it’s a bit of a hybrid — and that’s fine, because creative writers can invent new forms as they please. Sonnets usually have a very precise rhyme-scheme, and you can see that here: I make it out to be ABBA ABBA CDDC DC. By showing your students these details of structure they will come to appreciate the intricate literary craftsmanship that poets put into their work.

And did your scholars recognize a little punctuational detail that’s important to the poem’s meter and to correct pronunciation? In the phrase I pulled out for the title of this post — “Poor, middle-agèd summer” — Jackson uses a grave accent to indicate that “agèd” is pronounced as two syllables (age-ed) rather than one (aged). (Turn to page 768 in your family dictionary to find an explanation of the grave accent in English.) Each line in this sonnet is ten syllables long, and to maintain that pattern, Jackson needs “agèd” to count as two. The learnèd little  `  accomplishes just that.

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

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

❡ Poor, middle-agèd summer: 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. 📖

🌕 RESEARCH PROJECTS for Homeschool Students – August 2019

by Bob O'Hara

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-08-lunar

There’s a full moon today, 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 well 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 accomplishments.

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 561 checklists (daily observation reports) for this locality — it’s a site that had never been documented before. When all the checklists are combined and charted automatically by eBird you can really get a sense of the seasonal distribution and migration patterns for the year — take a look:

And here’s a sample checklist so you can see what they look like:

You can start keeping a similar eBird 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 useful 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:

Facebook users click to: riverhouses.org/2019-08-lunar

That’s just a simple graphing exercise — it’s something that can be refined, developed, and expanded 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: You can learn more about the original Lunar Society of Birmingham in “The Lunar Men,” a fine short video from History West Midlands. 🌕

❡ Featured this month at Zooniverse: Looking for a place to start? Zooniverse.org is one of the biggest clearinghouses for citizen science projects, and each month on their front page they specially feature one of their many research projects that you can join. This month’s featured project is “Wild Gabon.” If you’re looking for a project to get yourself started, this might be a great choice. 😊

❡ 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: This is one of our regular Lunar Society Bulletins about the many cooperative research projects we recommend to homeschool students. 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. 🗞