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🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 18 August 2019

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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

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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

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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!”

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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 OPPORTUNITIES for Homeschool Students – August 2019

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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. 🗞

🔎 HOMESCHOOL RESEARCH AND NEWS – August 2019

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

This is a new feature we’re trying out here at the River Houses: a quick monthly roundup of some recent academic publications and news about homeschooling, offered for your interest. These items may have a positive, negative, or neutral outlook on home education — and if they don’t seem appealing, just scroll on by. The title links generally point to the full text of each publication (often a pdf file). (Facebook readers should click to the attached blog post to find these links live.) The abstracts are quoted in full when possible, without editing. This month’s offerings:

(1) Teaching Writing in the Homeschool High School Classroom and Beyond — Teagan Knoblich

Abstract: Most high schoolers in America operate with basic writing skills at best (U.S. Department of Education, 2012). Students who are educated at home, or homeschoolers, may be only marginally better in their writing skills, if at all. A review of materials available to home educators for the instruction of their homeschool students revealed that available writing curricula does not do a good job covering more than a few basic writing forms, such as research and narrative. This creative project aimed to create writing instruction materials that could be used by home educators to teach their high school students how to write well. In order to create versatile materials that educators can personalize and individualize for their students, genre pedagogy approaches were used. Genre pedagogy considers all texts based on the situation in which they were written, including the purpose of the piece, the audience it was written for, and the context it was written in. Teaching students to be mindful of a text’s genre and situation prepares them to analyze and write in any genre form. As such, the materials created for this creative project informs educators on the basic principles of genre pedagogy, provides a step-by-step process for creating a writing unit based on genre pedagogies, and offers three writing units that familiarize students with the writing situation as well as the process of analyzing a text’s genre. The resulting materials are flexible and will aid home educators in their instruction of writing. Finally, conclusions were drawn about the need for more robust writing curricula, particularly for home educators and recommendations were made for further research where the literature review showed a distinct lack of materials.

(2) The Role of Homeschooling in the Modern Era — Ajeng Apriliana Nur Icmi & Yoyon Suryono

Abstract: This study aims to determine the education of Homeschooling and how the role of Homeschooling in today’s digital era. This is a literature study. Parents today are increasingly aware that they are able to develop models of adjusted to the child’s character, and the child’s psychological state. Homeschooling as a substitute for formal education. Homeschooling is the hope of parents to provide education that is able to develop religious and moral values in children and provide a comfortable learning atmosphere for children.

What interesting homeschool news and research have you come across lately? 👩🏻‍🎓

❡ Explore more: If you’d like to investigate the academic literature on homeschooling, the best place to start is Google Scholar (scholar.google.com), the special academic search engine from Google. Just enter a search term or phrase of interest (“homeschool,” “unschooling,” “classical homeschooling,” “deschooling,” etc.), and Google Scholar will return a list of academic publications that mention your topic. 🔎

❡ Stay in the loop: This is one of our regular Homeschool Research & News 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. 🗞

🇺🇸 WEEKLY WORLD HERITAGE: Hawaii Volcanoes National Park

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

Every Wednesday we’ve been posting a World Heritage Site for you and your students to explore, drawn from one of our homeschool countries-of-the-week. The River Houses year is winding down, and we completed our tour of countries last week with Zimbabwe. For a final site this year, we’re going to select one inside rather than outside the United States — the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park in our final state, Hawaii.

“Aerial view of Halemaʻumaʻu Crater, September 2009.” (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

The Hawaii Volcanoes National Park includes some of the most active and most accessible volcanic areas in the world:

“This site contains two of the most active volcanoes in the world, Mauna Loa (4,170 m high) and Kilauea (1,250 m high), both of which tower over the Pacific Ocean. Volcanic eruptions have created a constantly changing landscape, and the lava flows reveal surprising geological formations. Rare birds and endemic species can be found there, as well as forests of giant ferns…. This property serves as an excellent example of island building through volcanic processes. Through the process of shield-building volcanism, the park’s landscape is one of relatively constant, dynamic change.“ (UNESCO World Heritage Centre #409)

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. 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 in your history encyclopedia, and you’re done. Over the course of the year, without even realizing it, your students will absorb a wealth of new historical and geographical 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. 🌏

🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 11 August 2019

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-08-11

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 Hawaii, and our “country” is Antarctica 🇦🇶. (Our separate Sunday States & Countries post for the week went up just a few minutes ago — and our annual tour of the U.S. states and the countries of the world is coming to an end!)

🌔 THE MOON at the beginning of this week is gibbous and waxing — a good time for moon watching, but alas it will wash out some of this weekend’s Perseid meteors. 🌠 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, 11 August) — Today is the 223rd day of 2019; there are 142 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). 📚 The annual PERSEID METEOR SHOWER will peak (probably) on the nights of 11–12 and 12–13 August this year. 🌠 The Perseids are debris from Comet Swift–Tuttle. ☄️

Monday (12 August) — Today is the birthday of poet and educator Katharine Lee Bates (1859–1929), the author of the great anthem “America the Beautiful.” 🇺🇸 It’s also the birthday of Austrian physicist and Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961), one of the founders of quantum mechanics. ⚛

Tuesday (13 August) — Today is the birthday of American abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Lucy Stone (1818–1893). 👩‍👧‍👧 It’s also the birthday of spooky British-American film director Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980). 🎬 And, it’s International Lefthanders Day! 🎉

Wednesday (14 August) — On this day in the year 1040, Scotland’s King Duncan I was killed by his rival Macbeth — probably in battle, and not in his sleep as depicted in Shakespeare’s play. 🗡

Thursday (15 August) — Today is the birthday of the French general and emperor Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821). 👑 It’s also the birthday of the great British pianist and composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912). 🎵 Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, by Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885), for the third week of August is “August” for, um, August! Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us throughout the year. 🖋 And, there’s a full moon tonight, so that means we’ll have a report on student research opportunities from the River Houses Lunar Society (riverhouses.org/lunar). 🌕

Friday (16 August) — On this day in 1858, the first transatlantic telegraph cable was put into service with an exchange of messages between U.S. President James Buchanan and Britain’s Queen Victoria. 🇺🇸⌁🇬🇧

Saturday (17 August) — On this day in 1807, the world’s first commercial steamboat service was inaugurated when Robert Fulton’s North River Steamboat departed New York City for Albany, 130 miles up the Hudson River. 🚢

Sunday (18 August) — On this day in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing women the right to vote, was ratified. ☑️

🥂 OUR WEEKLY TOAST: “Here’s wishing us all more friends — and less need of them.”

❡ 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: Antarctica is our “country” of the week, so our Weekly World River is the Beardmore Glacier, one of the world’s largest glaciers and a famous river of ice that guided many early polar explorers. You can chart its course in your recommended homeschool atlas (riverhouses.org/books), and you can read more about it in the Beardmore Glacier entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

The Beardmore Glacier in 1956, photographed from the air. (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!

AND DON’T FORGET: Friday the 13th comes on a Tuesday this month! 🙀

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: Hawaii, Antarctica, and More

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

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 — the last one!

  • 🇺🇸
    Hawaii State Quarter
    HAWAII (the 50th state, 21 August 1959) — The Aloha State. Capital: Honolulu. Hawaii can be found on page 568 in your almanac and on plates 46 and 142 in your atlas. Name origin: “Possibly derived from Hawaiki or Owhyhee, Polynesian word for ‘homeland’” (almanac page 430). State bird: Hawaiian Goose (Nene). Website: portal.ehawaii.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.

We finished our tour of the nations of the world last week with Zimbabwe, so this week, to keep tropical Hawaii company, we’ll do polar Antarctica, the only non-national continent in the world:

  • 🇦🇶 ANTARCTICA, surrounding the South Pole and surrounded by the Southern Ocean. Population: Antarctica is the only continent that has never had a native human population. It is occupied today by about a thousand scientists scattered at various research stations across the continent (this number is lower in the winter and higher in the summer). Capital: Antarctica isn’t a nation-state, so it has no capital. The main research stations are located on the Antarctic Peninsula, at McMurdo Sound, and at the South Pole. Government: Antarctica is governed by an international treaty that went into force in 1961. You can read more about it on the comprehensive Antarctic Treaty System page in Wikipedia. Website: The Internet registration system has created the top-level domain of .aq for Antarctica, but I haven’t been able to find any websites that actually use it — perhaps you’ll be able to discover one! The United States research programs in Antarctica (www.usap.gov) are administered by the National Science Foundation; their website is full of information and even provides some live webcams of Antarctic scenery. ❄️

Even though Antarctica has no native human population, it has had a rich history since the nineteenth century when its outlines were first descried. The “heroic age of Antarctic exploration” is a wonderful subject of study for any adventurous homeschooler. Your River Houses atlas (riverhouses.org/books) also has a great map of the Antarctic continent (plate 113) with extensive notes and annotations — it’s quite worthy of exploration itself! Even your River Houses history encyclopedia has a brief outline of Antarctic history as the very last item in its collection of national history profiles (page 599).

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

❡ 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. 🇺🇸 🌎

🌟 STAR BRIGHT: Vega for August

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

August is the last month of Hercules Term in the River Houses, and as our monthly star calendar will tell you, August’s Great Star is Vega, the brightest star in the constellation Lyra the Lyre. Its formal designation is α Lyrae — “alpha of Lyra.” Vega is one of my favorites and it’s almost directly overhead (near the zenith) every evening this month just after sunset, passing off to the west as the night goes on.

The constellation Lyra the Lyre and its alpha star, Vega. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

If you want to introduce your students to Vega and Lyra, you can start with some basic astronomy from your homeschool star atlas (riverhouses.org/books):

“Lyra is easily identified because of Vega, a brilliant white star of magnitude 0.0, the fourth brightest star in the sky and the second brightest visible from northern latitudes. Four smaller stars lie in a faint but conspicuous parallelogram just to the southeast of Vega. Although a small constellation, Lyra is rich in stars; sweep slowly with binoculars, particularly the area between β [beta] and γ [gamma] Lyrae. Do not fail to observe β [beta] Lyrae, an eclipsing binary whose light changes are visible to the naked eye, the magnitude varying from 3.4 to 4.3. ε [epsilon] Lyrae is the famous “double double”; persons with very keen eyesight can see the two components. They are easily split with binoculars. In a telescope, each of the components itself becomes a double.“ (Celestron Sky Maps, page 12)

The planisphere on the front of your star atlas will help you locate Vega, and that’s plenty for beginning students — your little lesson is done. If you want to get more advanced, the Wikipedia page on Vega is packed with additional information on everything from astrometry to cultural history.

Because of its prominence in the northern hemisphere night sky, Vega has played an important role in the development of modern astronomy. It was the first star other than the sun to be photographed (by daguerreotype in 1850), and the first star other than the sun to have its spectrum analyzed (in the 1870s). When the scale of stellar magnitudes was refined during the nineteenth century, Vega was chosen as the principal reference star with a defined magnitude of 0.0.

A true-color image of blue-white Vega, the alpha star of the constellation Lyra. (Image: Stephen Rahn via Wikimedia Commons.)

Modern calculations put Vega at a distance of about 25 light years — practically next door in astronomical terms. It’s estimated to be about two and a half times the diameter of the sun, but it is rotating so rapidly that it bulges out at the equator, making it more egg-shaped than spherical. It’s also quite a bit younger than the sun, with an estimated age of only 455 million years (compared to the sun’s age of more than 4.5 billion).

This month, take your homeschool students out at dusk and introduce them to this great nearby sun, and teach them its name, and so give them a new friend for life.

What stellar observations have you made in your homeschool lately? 😊

❡ Alpha and beta and gamma, oh my: Most of the principal stars within each constellation have both old vernacular names — Vega, Sirius, Arcturus, and so on — as well as more formal scientific designations. The German astronomer Johann Bayer (1572–1625) devised the formal system of star designations that is still in common use today. In Bayer’s system, the stars in each constellation, from brightest to dimmest, are assigned a lowercase letter of the Greek alphabet: α (alpha, brightest), β (beta, second brightest), γ (gamma, third brightest), δ (delta, fourth brightest), and so on. This letter designation is combined with the Latin name of the constellation in its possessive (genitive) form: Lyra becomes Lyrae (“of Lyra”), Canis Major becomes Canis Majoris (“of Canis Major”), and so on. The brightest star in the constellation Lyra (the star Vega) thus becomes α Lyrae (“alpha of Lyra”), the brightest star in Canis Major (the star Sirius) becomes α Canis Majoris (“alpha of Canis Major”), and so on, through all 24 Greek letters and all 88 constellations. How bright would you expect, say, the σ (sigma) star of Orion to be? Not very bright — it’s far down the alphabet — but σ Orionis happens to be the top star of Orion’s sword, so even though it’s not very bright it’s still notable and easy to locate on a dark night. ✨

❡ Star bright: The brightness of a star as we see it in our night sky is its magnitude — or more properly speaking, its apparent magnitude. The scale of star magnitudes was developed centuries ago, long before modern measuring instruments were invented, so it can be a little bit confusing for beginners. Originally, the brightest stars in the sky were called “first magnitude” and the less-bright stars “second magnitude,” “third magnitude,” and so on, down to the dimmest stars visible to the naked eye, which were called “sixth magnitude.” In the nineteenth century the star Vega (our August star) was chosen as the standard brightness reference and its value on the magnitude scale was defined to be zero (0.0). Five steps in magnitude (from 0.0 to 5.0 or from 1.0 to 6.0) was defined to be a change in brightness of 100 times: a star 100 times dimmer than Vega (0.0) was defined to be a magnitude 5.0 star. Vega is not quite the brightest star is the sky, however, so the scale also had to be extended into negative numbers: Sirius, for example, is magnitude –1.5, about three times brighter than Vega (at 0.0). The planet Venus at its brightest is about magnitude –4.2; the full moon is about magnitude –12.9; the sun is magnitude –26.7. By contrast, the dimmest stars visible to the naked eye in a populated, light-polluted area are about magnitude 3.0; the dimmest stars visible under very dark conditions are about magnitude 6.5. The Hubble Space Telescope has imaged distant stars and galaxies below magnitude 30, the dimmest celestial objects humans have seen so far. 🔭

❡ Watchers of the skies: Teaching your students to recognize the constellations is one of the simplest and most enduring gifts you can give them. The planisphere on the front of your River Houses star atlas (riverhouses.org/books) will let you dial up the northern hemisphere sky for any night of the year, and the descriptions and maps of each constellation will point out the highlights, including the names and characteristics of the brightest stars. Your general world atlas also has beautiful maps of the whole northern and southern hemisphere night skies on plates 121–122. Why not find a dark-sky spot near you this month and spend some quality homeschool time beneath the starry vault. 🌠 🔭 🌌 🌟

❡ First star I see tonight: This is one of our monthly “Great Star” posts featuring twelve of the most notable stars of the northern hemisphere night sky. Download and print your own copy of our River Houses Star Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us as we visit a different Great Star each month — and make each one of them a homeschool friend for life. 🌟

🌠 PERSEID METEORS for August 2019

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

The annual Perseid meteor shower peaks each year around 12–13 August, so this weekend is the time to be on the lookout — make it an annual homeschool tradition! You can get some quick facts and local observing recommendations at the helpful timeanddate.com website:

The Perseids appear to radiate from the constellation Perseus, which rises in the east about 11:00 p.m. at this time of year, so that’s the general direction you’ll want to be looking. Your River Houses star atlas (riverhouses.org/books) will let you dial up a map of the constellations for this night (or any night) and will help you orient yourself to the sky overhead.

Meteor showers like the Perseids occur when the earth in its orbit around the sun passes through the trail of debris left behind by a comet making its orbit around the sun (that’s why they occur at the same time each year). You and your students can learn all about meteors and meteor showers on the website of the American Meteor Society — here are some of their resources:

The AMS also has a printable poster of basic meteor terminology — it’s just the thing for your homeschool bulletin board.

Meteor terminology, a free printable poster available from the American Meteor Society.

There is a truly remarkable interactive animation of the Perseid meteor shower and its parent comet available from the website meteorshowers.org. Until quite recently, interactive animations of this kind would have been available only on the most advanced computers, but now you can examine them in detail from the comfort of your little home academy. 😊

Note that this animation is fully interactive: by dragging and scrolling across the screen you can tilt the plane of the solar system to view it from above or below, and you can zoom in on the earth’s or the comet’s orbit. (The earth is the blue planet orbiting third from the sun.)

Pay a nighttime visit to a dark-sky location near your homeschool in the next few days, look toward Perseus, and see what shooting stars you can see. 🌠

What celestial observations will you and your students be making in your homeschool this month? 😊

❡ Watchers of the skies: Teaching your students to recognize the constellations is one of the simplest and most enduring gifts you can give them. The planisphere on the front of your River Houses star atlas (riverhouses.org/books) will let you dial up the northern hemisphere sky for any night of the year, and the descriptions and maps of each constellation will point out the highlights. Find a dark-sky spot near you this month and spend some quality homeschool time beneath the starry vault. 🌠 🔭 🌌

❡ Star bright: This is one of our regular Homeschool Astronomy posts. Add your name to our River Houses mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox every week. 😊

🌠 WONDERFUL WORDS: “A Star in a Stoneboat”

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

The annual Perseid meteor shower is expected to peak this coming weekend, but this year the meteors will be competing with a nearly full moon, alas. The Perseids may be wonderful or washed out, but our homeschool poem-of-the-week for this second week of August will still be a playfully brilliant verse drawn from the world’s small store of meteor poems: Robert Frost’s “A Star in a Stoneboat.”

Usually we dive right in with the text, but this week your students really do have to know first what a stoneboat is. It’s not a boat, and it’s not made of stone; it’s a piece of farm equipment like a sled or toboggan that’s used for dragging stones out of a field. Frost was a New England poet, and here in New England if you wanted to plant an acre of corn, you first had to drag a few tons of rocks out of the way.

“Stone boats were the pick-up trucks of yesterday.” (Image: Stoneboat Farm, Hillsboro, Oregon.)

And since wise old farmers never let anything go to waste, those few tons of rocks were generally piled up along the edge of the field where they served pretty well to keep the pigs out of the corn, too.

Stone wall beside Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Old Manse” in Concord, Massachusetts. (Image: Robert Thorson via atlasobscura.com.)

With that background — that stoneboats were the pickup trucks of yesterday — we can proceed with the meteoric tale of “A Star in a Pickup Truck.”

A Star in a Stoneboat

Never tell me that not one star of all
That slip from heaven at night and softly fall
Has been picked up with stones to build a wall.

Some laborer found one faded and stone-cold,
And saving that its weight suggested gold
And tugged it from his first too certain hold,

He noticed nothing in it to remark.
He was not used to handling stars thrown dark
And lifeless from an interrupted arc.

He did not recognize in that smooth coal
The one thing palpable besides the soul
To penetrate the air in which we roll.

He did not see how like a flying thing
It brooded ant eggs, and had one large wing,
One not so large for flying in a ring,

And a long Bird of Paradise’s tail
(Though these when not in use to fly and trail
It drew back in its body like a snail);

Nor know that he might move it from the spot —
The harm was done: from having been star-shot
The very nature of the soil was hot

And burning to yield flowers instead of grain,
Flowers fanned and not put out by all the rain
Poured on them by his prayers prayed in vain.

He moved it roughly with an iron bar,
He loaded an old stoneboat with the star
And not, as you might think, a flying car,

Such as even poets would admit perforce
More practical than Pegasus the horse
If it could put a star back in its course.

He dragged it through the plowed ground at a pace
But faintly reminiscent of the race
Of jostling rock in interstellar space.

It went for building stone, and I, as though
Commanded in a dream, forever go
To right the wrong that this should have been so.

Yet ask where else it could have gone as well,
I do not know — I cannot stop to tell:
He might have left it lying where it fell.

From following walls I never lift my eye,
Except at night to places in the sky
Where showers of charted meteors let fly.

Some may know what they seek in school and church,
And why they seek it there; for what I search
I must go measuring stone walls, perch on perch;

Sure that though not a star of death and birth,
So not to be compared, perhaps, in worth
To such resorts of life as Mars and Earth —

Though not, I say, a star of death and sin,
It yet has poles, and only needs a spin
To show its worldly nature and begin

To chafe and shuffle in my calloused palm
And run off in strange tangents with my arm,
As fish do with the line in first alarm.

Such as it is, it promises the prize
Of the one world complete in any size
That I am like to compass, fool or wise.

This is a wonderfully clever poem — a long string of comparisons and contrasts — and you and your students can spend quite a bit of time trying to figure it out sentence by sentence. I won’t go through all the components here, but just look first at the very tight structure. “A Star in a Stoneboat” is made up not of couplets (rhymed pairs) but of triplets, where all three line-ends rhyme: all–fall–wall, cold–gold–hold, remark–dark–arc, all through the entire poem. That’s fairly uncommon in English, and it’s difficult to do. Next, count syllables: you’ll find that every line has exactly ten. The constraints Frost imposed on himself in adopting this compact form account for some of the complexities of the poem’s word-order, which admittedly can take a bit of effort to follow.

What the content of the poem generally does throughout is contrast the “life” of this imagined meteor once upon a time when it was flying through space, with its “life” after its arc was interrupted and it ignominiously landed in some farmer’s field, got pried out of the ground by a workman, and was dumped onto a stoneboat. Formerly it had raced past the planets; now it’s keeping pigs out of the corn. “Yet ask where else it could have gone as well, / I do not know.” See how many earthly–heavenly contrasts or comparisons your students can identify, all of them mediated by this imagined meteorite. And ask them if they’d like to be, like the narrator, a wanderer along the walls, mile on mile, searching for stones that had once been stars.

“From following walls I never lift my eye, / Except at night to places in the sky / Where showers of charted meteors fly.” (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

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

❡ Stars thrown dark: 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. 📖