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Archives for April 2020

🌎 🇵🇾 WEEKLY WORLD HERITAGE: The Historic Jesuit Missions of Paraguay

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Paraguay in central South America is one of our homeschool countries-of-the-week, so why not spend a few minutes today learning about one of Paraguay’s World Heritage Sites: the Historic Jesuit Missions of La Santísima Trinidad de Paraná and Jesús de Tavarangue.

Ruins of the Jesuit Mission of La Santísima Trinidad de Paraná in southern Paraguay. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

These two locations document the history of Catholic missionary work carried out by the Jesuit Order in South America beginning in the 1600s:

“Jesuit Missions of La Santísima Trinidad de Paraná and Jesús de Tavarangue are part of a series of 30 missions in the Río de la Plata basin established by the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) during the 17th and 18th centuries. Seven of these missions were located in Paraguay and the rest in the present-day countries of Argentina and Brazil. The mission complexes were attached to reducciones (settlements) and are evidence of a unique urban scheme. While each period had a singular style, all combined indigenous elements with Christian attributes and symbolism exhibiting Baroque, Romanesque and Greek influences, as part of an unprecedented process of acculturation.

“The Jesuits arrived in the Guayrá [region of Paraguay and Brazil] in 1588. With the permission of King Philip II of Spain, the missionaries’ goal was to Christianize the indigenous population as well as to protect them from the colonial labour system of encomienda, a condition of virtual slavery. The inhabitants were brought together and encouraged to adopt a sedentary form of life and the Christian religion but unlike other missions in the New World, they were not forced to “Europeanize.” Many indigenous traditions were retained and encouraged such as the cultivation of yerba mate (Ilex paraguarienses), which continues to be a representative regional product today.“ (UNESCO World Heritage Centre #648)

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 feature 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.

The World Heritage Centre also has a free and comprehensive World Heritage education kit for teachers, as well as a wonderful full-color wall map of World Heritage Sites (riverhouses.org/2019-wh-map), available for the cost of shipping. Why not add them both to your own homeschool library. 🗺

What world treasures have you been exploring in your homeschool this Leo Term? 😊

❡ 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 the WHC’s brief 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 featuring historical and natural sites of international importance. Download a copy of our River Houses World Heritage Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us as we tour the planet, and add your name to our weekly mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🌎

📚 🐦 LIBRARY LESSONS: The Macaulay Library of Natural History

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The upcoming month of May is our Bird Migration Month in the River Houses, and if you are studying birds or natural history in general in your homeschool, there’s no better place to explore online (for hours!) than the Macaulay Library at Cornell University — this May or any month of the year.

[See attached blog post for images and sounds]

The Macaulay Library is an international repository not of books, but of sound recordings and images from nature:

“The Macaulay Library is the world’s premier scientific archive of natural history audio, video, and photographs. Although the Macaulay Library’s history is rooted in birds, the collection includes amphibians, fishes, and mammals, and the collection preserves recordings of each species’ behavior and natural history. Our mission is to facilitate the ability of others to collect and preserve such recordings and to actively promote the use of these recordings for diverse purposes spanning scientific research, education, conservation, and the arts.“ (macaulaylibrary.org)

The Macaulay Library was established almost a hundred years ago as the Library of Natural Sounds by Cornell ornithologist Arthur Allen (1885–1964), a pioneer in recording and analyzing bird songs with the bulky recording equipment of the day. The original natural sounds collection has since expanded to include photographs and video recordings, and while it focuses largely on birds, it includes materials on other groups as well.

Pick any bird in North America, and almost any bird species in the rest of the world as well, and you can pull up photographs and sound recordings from the Macaulay Library. In much of the United States this month, for example, you can hear Mockingbirds like this one singing all day long with barely a pause:

[See attached blog post for images and sounds]

Or maybe you’ve got one of these noisy little fellows in your backyard this month:

[See attached blog post for images and sounds]

You can search the Macaulay Library’s collections by species and by region, and you can filter for image and sound quality, age, sex, associated behaviors, and more.

We use images and sounds from the Macaulay Library to illustrate our Friday Bird Families posts here at the River Houses, and you can always click on the Macaulay Library catalog numbers in the captions of these images to find out more and to browse related images and sounds of the species shown.

[See attached blog post for images and sounds]

If you have curious naturalists in your homeschool, set them down in front of a large screen (for better viewing) and invite them to spend some time discovering the sights and sounds of birds all over the world.

What educational treasures have you discovered in your library this Leo Term? 😊

❡ Dukedoms large enough: Have you found all the local libraries in your area? There may be more than you realize, and there’s no better homeschool field trip than a field trip to a new library! The WorldCat Library Finder will help you find all the library collections near you — public and private, large and small — and the WorldCat catalog itself will help you locate the closest copy of almost any book in the world. 😊

❡ Books in the running brooks: The sidebar on the River Houses website (riverhouses.org) has links to several important online library collections that we like to explore, as well as permanent links to WorldCat and the WorldCat Library Finder. Why not sit yourself down at a large screen for a while (rather than a phone) and give them a browse. 😊

❡ When in doubt, go to the library: This is one of our regular Homeschool Books & Libraries posts. Add your name to our 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 26 April 2020

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Click to: riverhouses.org/2020-04-26

Quick Freshes are our regular Sunday notes on the homeschool week ahead. Pick one or two (or more) of the items below each week and use them to enrich your homeschooling schedule! Visit our River Houses calendar page (riverhouses.org/calendars) and print your own homeschool calendars (and planners!) for the entire year.

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is West Virginia, and our COUNTRIES are Paraguay 🇵🇾, Peru 🇵🇪, the Philippines 🇵🇭, and Poland 🇵🇱. (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 a waxing crescent — a good time for stargazing! You can explore the night sky and the features of the moon in your recommended backyard astronomy guide and your homeschool world atlas, and you can learn a host of stellar and lunar facts on pages 342–357 in your almanac (riverhouses.org/books). Browse through our many astronomy posts for even more!

🗓 TODAY, Sunday (26 April 2020) — Today is the 117th day of 2020; there are 249 days remaining in this leap year. Learn more about different kinds of modern and historical calendars on pages 350–356 in your River Houses almanac (riverhouses.org/books). 📚 On this day in 1803, thousands of meteor fragments fell from the skies over L’Aigle, France, demonstrating conclusively that “shooting stars” were in fact rocks falling from the sky. 🌠 And today is the birthday of the famous French-American naturalist and artist John James Audubon (1785–1851). 🎨

Monday (27 April 2020) — On this day in 1667, blind and impoverished, John Milton sold the publishing rights to his masterpiece Paradise Lost for £5. 🍎 And today is the birthday of the American artist and inventor Samuel F.B. Morse (1791–1872), the creator of Morse Code. 🎨

Tuesday (28 April 2020) — It’s the birthday of the American novelist Harper Lee (1926–2016), author of the school-standard story To Kill a Mockingbird. 🖋

Wednesday (29 April 2020) — Today is the birthday of the great American jazz musician and composer Duke Ellington (1899–1974). 🎹 And our Wednesday tour of World Heritage Sites this week will visit the historic Jesuit Missions of Paraguay. 🇵🇾

Thursday (30 April 2020) — On this day in 1789, on the balcony of Federal Hall in New York City, George Washington took the oath of office as the first President of the United States. 🇺🇸 And on this day in 1897, British physicist J.J. Thompson announced the discovery of the electron. ⚛️ Today is also the birthday of the great American choral conductor Robert Shaw (1916–1999). 🎶

Friday (1 May 2020) — Happy May! 🌼 May is Bird Migration Month in the River Houses. Keep an eye on the season’s progress at birdcast.info. 🐦 The world’s first postage stamp, the Penny Black, was issued on this day in 1840 in the United Kingdom. 📬 And on this day in 1931, the Empire State Building was dedicated in New York City as (at the time) the tallest building in the world. 🏙 Our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the first week of May is, naturally enough, “May and the Poets” by Leigh Hunt (1784–1859). 🌼 Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us throughout the year. 🖋 Our Friday Bird Families post this week will introduce you to a number of small insect-eating birds: the Sylviid Warblers, Leaf Warblers, and Old World Flycatchers. Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us throughout the year. 🦅

Saturday (2 May 2020) — Peter and the Wolf, the much-loved orchestral work for children by Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953), debuted in Moscow on this day in 1936. 🐺 And since this is the first Saturday of the month, we’ll post our regular monthly preview today of some of the astronomical events you and your students can watch for over the next few weeks. 🔭

Sunday (3 May 2020) — Today is the birthday of the famous Italian Renaissance historian and political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527). 👑 And on this day in 1715, Edmund Halley (of comet fame) successfully predicted, to within four minutes’ accuracy, a total solar eclipse that was visible across much of Europe. 🌍 🌑 ☀️

👨‍🌾 THIS WEEK’S TOAST, for all the farmers of the world, is an old traditional for the beginning of the growing season:

Good luck to the hoof and the horn!
Good luck to the flock and the fleece!
Good luck to the growers of corn!
With blessings of plenty and peace!

❡ 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!”). What will you toast this week? 🥂

🌏 🇵🇭 EVERYTHING FLOWS: The Philippines in southeastern Asia is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Agusan River on the Philippine island of Mindanao. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas (riverhouses.org/books), and you can read more about it in the Agusan entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

The Agusan River near Butuan City in the Philippines. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

❡ Let the river run: Why not do a homeschool study of world rivers over the course of the year? Take the one we select each week (above), or start with the river lists in your almanac (pages 691–693), and make it a project to look them all up in your atlas, or in a handy encyclopedia either online or on a weekly visit to your local library. A whole world of geographical learning awaits you. 🌏

What do you have planned for your homeschool this week? 😊

❡ Lively springs: This is one of our regular “Quick Freshes” posts looking at the homeschool week ahead. Add your name to our River Houses mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get these weekly messages delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. You can also print your own River Houses calendars of educational events (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us. 🗓

🌎 🇺🇸 SUNDAY STATES: West Virginia, Paraguay, Poland, and More

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Click to: riverhouses.org/2020-west-virginia

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. Our annual review begins at the start of the River Houses year in September and goes through the states in the traditional order of admission to the Union (almanac page 420), so this week’s state is:

  • 🇺🇸
    West Virginia State Bird and Flower
    WEST VIRGINIA (the 35th state, 20 June 1863) — The Mountain State. Capital: Charleston. West Virginia can be found on page 589 in your almanac and on plates 43 and 142 in your atlas. Name origin: “So named when western counties of Virginia refused to secede from the U.S. in 1863” (almanac page 422). State bird: Northern Cardinal (bird guide page 522). Website: www.wv.gov.

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

❡ Explore more: If you’re planning an extended unit-study of one or more of the U.S. states, be sure to look into the primary source materials for teachers available at the Library of Congress.

We go through the countries of the world in alphabetical order, so this week’s countries, with their official websites, are:

  • 🇵🇾 PARAGUAY in central South America. Population: 7,108,524. Capital: Asunción. Government: Presidential republic. Website: www.presidencia.gov.py (in Spanish).
  • 🇵🇪 PERU in western South America. Population: 31,624,207. Capital: Lima. Government: Presidential republic. Website: www.gob.pe (in Spanish).
  • 🇵🇭 THE PHILIPPINES in southeastern Asia. Population: 107,535,277. Capital: Manila. Government: Presidential republic. Website: www.gov.ph (in English).
  • 🇵🇱 POLAND in central Europe. Population: 38,356,121. Capital: Warsaw. Government: Parliamentary republic. Website: www.poland.gov.pl (in English).

These all appear in your current almanac, atlas, and history encyclopedia as well (riverhouses.org/books). The almanac, for example, has profiles of the nations of the world on pages 745–852; the endpapers of the atlas are index maps that will show you where each of the individual national and regional maps can be found; the history encyclopedia includes individual national histories on pages 489–599; and you can find additional illustrations, flags, and other mentions through the indexes in each of these volumes.

What grand global geographical excursions (real or virtual) have you been making in your homeschool this Leo Term? 😊

❡ Read and think critically: The country links above go to official websites, which are not always in English and which may well be propagandistic in one way or another, thus offering older students a good opportunity to exercise their critical reading and thinking skills. 🔍

❡ Come, here’s the map: Teaching your students to be fluent with high-quality maps — not just basically competent, but fluent — is one of the best educational gifts you can give them. Why not look up any one of our selected states or countries each week in your recommended homeschool atlas (riverhouses.org/books) and show your students how to locate rivers, lakes, marshes, water depths, mountains and their elevations, highway numbers, airports, oil fields, railroads, ruins, battle sites, small towns, big cities, regional capitals, national capitals, parks, deserts, glaciers, borders, grid references, lines of longitude and latitude, and much more. There is so much information packed into professional maps of this kind that a magnifying glass is always helpful, even for young folks with good eyesight. The endpapers of the atlas and the technical map-reading information on Plate 2 will guide you in your voyages of discovery. 🗺

❡ 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 an educational tour of the United States and the whole world over the course of the homeschool year. And don’t forget to add your name to our free mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) to get more great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox every week. 🇺🇸 🌎

🌌 SATURDAY STARS: The World at Night

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Click to: riverhouses.org/2020-dark-sky

This is International Dark Sky Week! That makes it a perfect week to encourage your young scholars to appreciate the night sky — if they don’t already (and we hope they do).

The night sky is one thing that all humanity shares. Although the constellations may differ from northern hemisphere to southern hemisphere, the night sky’s behavior is common to us all — the rising and setting of the stars, the passage of the planets, the regular meteor showers, the phases of the moon, and on and on.

Here’s a magnificent one-minute video of the night sky all around the world, released for this year’s International Dark Sky Week by NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day website. Why not share it this week with your students:

➢

The video features night-sky scenes from the United States, Germany, Russia, Iran, Nepal, Thailand, Laos, China, and Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean.

What celestial sights and astronomical apparitions have you been examining in your homeschool this Leo Term? 🔭

❡ Choose something like a star: Teaching your students to recognize the constellations is one of the simplest and most enduring gifts you can give them. Your recommended backyard star guide and homeschool world atlas (riverhouses.org/books) both contain charts of the constellations that will show you the all the highlights. Find a dark-sky spot near you this month and spend some quality homeschool time beneath the starry vault. 🌌

❡ Star bright: If you’d like some light and easy homeschool astronomy lessons, download and print a copy of our annual River Houses Star Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us month by month as we make twelve heavenly friends-for-life over the course of the year. 🌟

❡ Watchers of the skies: 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. 🔭

🦅 FRIDAY BIRD FAMILIES: Gnatcatchers, Dippers, and Kinglets

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Every Friday we invite you and your homeschool students to learn about a different group of North American birds in your recommended bird guide (riverhouses.org/books). It’s a great way to add a few minutes of informal science, geography, natural history, and imagination to your homeschool schedule throughout the year.

This week’s birds (three different families) are the Gnatcatchers (pages 396–397), the Dippers (pages 398–399), and the Kinglets (pages 398–399).

[See attached blog post for images and video]

If you’re teaching younger children, the way to use these posts is just to treat your bird guide as a picture book and spend a few minutes each week looking at all the interesting birds they may see one day. With that, your little lesson is done.

If you have older students, one of your objectives should be to help them become fluent with a technical reference book that’s packed with dense information, the kind of book they will encounter in many different fields of study. Here are the bird guide’s introductions to this week’s groups, written in the customary telegraphic style:

“GNATCATCHERS — Family Polioptilidae. A New World family of small, active birds with long tails, which are usually cocked. Gnatcatchers are mostly shades of blue, white, and gray. All of our gnatcatcher species are polytypic [that is, they exhibit considerable geographical variation; they have “many types” or subspecies within each species]. Species: 15 World, 4 N.A. [North America]“

“DIPPERS — Family Cinclidae. Aquatic birds that wade and even swim underwater in clear, rushing mountain streams to feed. Species: 5 World, 1 N.A.“

“KINGLETS — Family Regulidae. Small, active birds that often hover to feed. Species: 6 World, 2 N.A.“

When you’re training your young naturalists, teach them to ask and answer from their bird guide some of the first questions any naturalist would ask about a new group — about the Kinglets, for example. How many species? (6 worldwide.) Are there any near us? (2 species in North America, and the individual maps will give us more detail.) What are their distinctive features? (Small, active, sometimes hover momentarily to feed, and so on.)

Pick a representative species or two to look at in detail each week and read the entry aloud, or have your students study it and then narrate it back to you, explaining all the information it contains. This week, for the Kinglet family, why not investigate both of the North American species: the Golden-crowned Kinglet and the Ruby-crowned Kinglet (page 398).

[See attached blog post for images and video]

All sorts of biological information is packed into the brief species descriptions in your bird guide — can your students tease it out? How big are these two similar species? (Only 4–4¼ inches long.) What are their scientific names? (Regulus satrapa and Regulus calendula.) Will you be able to find these species where you live? At what times of year and in what habitat? (Study the range map and range description carefully to answer those questions, and see the book’s back flap for a map key.) Do the males and females look alike? The adults and juveniles? What songs or calls do these species make? How can you distinguish them from similar species? (The text and illustrations should answer all these questions.)

Kinglets are very tiny birds — apart from hummingbirds, they are among the smallest in North America. Their colored crowns are often not visible (and only male Ruby-crowns have a ruby crown). Both species are found across the United States, and they can be easily told apart if you get a good view: the Golden-crowned has an eye-line and the Ruby-crowned has an eye-ring.

[See attached blog post for images and video]

For the Gnatcatcher family, why not look at the Blue-gray Gnatcatcher (page 396), the only widespread Gnatcatcher in the United States. It’s also a very tiny species, and much of its length is in its tail.

You can do little ten-minute lessons of this kind with any of the species in your bird guide that catch your interest. Pick one that is near you, or that looks striking, or that has a strange name, and explore. In our third family this week, for example, take a look at the American Dipper (page 398), a remarkable bird of the Rocky Mountains that often feeds underwater — the only small songbird to do so.

[See attached blog post for images and video]

In all these Friday Bird Families posts, our aim is not to present a specific set of facts to memorize. We hope instead to provide examples and starting points that you and your students can branch away from in many different directions. We also hope to show how you can help your students develop the kind of careful skills in reading, observation, and interpretation that they will need in all their future academic work.

What ornithological observations and naturalistical notes have you been making in your homeschool this Leo Term? 😊

❡ 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 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. 🐦

❡ Vade mecum: The front matter in your bird guide (riverhouses.org/books) (pages 6–13) explains a little bit about basic bird biology and about some of the technical terminology used throughout the book — why not have your students study it as a special project. Have them note particularly the diagrams showing the parts of a bird (pages 10–11) so they’ll be able to tell primaries from secondaries and flanks from lores. 🦉

❡ Words for birds: You may not think of your homeschool dictionary (riverhouses.org/books) as a nature reference, but a comprehensive dictionary will define and explain many of the standard scientific terms you will encounter in biology and natural history, although it will not generally contain the proper names of species or other taxonomic groups that aren’t part of ordinary English. (In other words, you’ll find “flamingo” but not Phoenicopterus, the flamingo genus.) One of the most important things students should be taught to look for in the dictionary is the information on word origins: knowing the roots of scientific terms makes it much easier to understand them and remember their meaning. 📖

❡ Come, here’s the map: Natural history and geography are deeply interconnected. One of the first questions you should teach your students to ask about any kind of animal or plant is, “What is its range? Where (in the world) does it occur?” Our recommended homeschool reference library (riverhouses.org/books) includes an excellent world atlas that will help your students appreciate many aspects of biogeography, the science of the geographical distribution of living things. 🌎

❡ Nature notes: This is one of our regular Friday Bird Families posts for homeschool naturalists. Print your own copy of our River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow along with us! You can also add your name to our free weekly mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🐦 🦉 🦆 🦃 🦅

🖋 🌸 WONDERFUL WORDS: Loveliest of Trees

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The flowering cherry trees are coming into bloom in my river valley this week, and tomorrow is National Arbor Day, so that means this is the perfect week to share a famous gem from A.E. Housman (1859–1936) — it’s our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the fourth week of April:

Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

This is a wonderful poem to memorize — why not give it a try with your students this week. It has a simple AABB rhyme scheme that’s easy to remember, and the meter is fairly regular iambic or trochaic tetrameter, which gives it a sprightly, lilting gait. There’s a bit of irregularity here and there — some lines have only seven syllables instead of the expected eight. And how many syllables does “Loveliest” have? Ordinary American English would give it three, but I’d venture that here it was originally meant to have two — something like “Lov-l’est.”

Great writers like Housman are very precise in their use of words, and that’s something you’ll want your students to appreciate. Send them to the family lexicon for the exact meanings of ride (noun definition #2, page 1509, “a path made for riding on horseback, especially through woodlands”) and tide (noun definition #4, page 1818, “A time or season. Often used in combination: eventide; Christmastide; Shrovetide“). Thus “woodland ride” and “Eastertide” are precise and perfect. Be sure also that your students are culturally literate readers and recognize “threescore years and ten” as the biblical allotment for a human life, from the book of Psalms: the narrator of this spring poem is twenty (“a score”), and is imagining that he has fifty more springs to go (for a total of three score and ten, or seventy).

Why not find a cherry tree in bloom about some woodland ride near you this week, and take along a copy of Housman, and have a little homeschool literature lesson that brings the tree and the words together — that will be better than any lesson you can teach in an indoor classroom. 🌸

What other wonderful words and poetical productions have you been studying in your homeschool this Leo Term? 🦁

❡ Fifty springs are little room: 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. 😊

❡ Literary lives: The website of the Poetry Foundation includes biographical notes and examples of the work of many important poets (including A.E. Housman) 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. Add your name to our River Houses mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) to get posts like these delivered right to your mailbox, and print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) to follow along with us as we visit forty-eight of our favorite friends over the course of the year. 📖

🖋 🎉 HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WILL! (Shakespeare, That Is)

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It’s Shakespeare’s birthday! Well, more or less.† And that’s good enough for us!

† The thing is, we don’t really know the exact date of Shakespeare’s birth. We do know that he was baptized on the 26th of April in 1564, and so was probably born just a few days earlier. The 23rd has become the customary date of celebration, and who are we to argue with that happy tradition? 😊

We love books and libraries and language and literature in the River Houses, and if you’re planning to study Shakespeare in your home academy — today, tomorrow, or any day in the future — you should definitely bookmark and explore the free teaching materials available online from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., one of the world’s leading centers for Shakespearean teaching and research:

The Folger is located on Capitol Hill, right next to the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court — a place of high honor indeed — and you can visit and tour the library the next time you make a homeschool trip to the nation’s capital.

At the Folger’s website you’ll find the full texts of all the plays and sonnets, lesson plans for many of them (with more on the way), and helpful summaries of each plot (Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and more).

Here’s a properly reverential reading from Macbeth that you can use to inspire your students this week — I didn’t learn this soliloquy until I was in high school, so this kid’s definitely got the jump on me:

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And if any of your students are aiming for a scholarly career, it’s never too early to start exposing them to an occasional reading of Shakespeare in the original language:

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What literary treasures have you laughed over in your homeschool this Leo Term? 😊

❡ Explore more: Your River Houses history encyclopedia (riverhouses.org/books) has a beautifully illustrated overview of the Elizabethan period, within which Shakespeare lived and worked, on pages 260–261. It’s just the background you need to do a wonderful homeschool history-and-literature lesson. 📖

❡ Books in the running brooks: The sidebar on the River Houses website (riverhouses.org) has links to several important online library collections that we like to explore, as well as permanent links to WorldCat and the WorldCat Library Finder. Why not sit yourself down at a large screen for a while (rather than a phone) and give them a browse. 😊

❡ When in doubt, go to the library: This is one of our regular Homeschool Books & Libraries posts. Add your name to our weekly mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 📚

🌏 🇵🇰 WEEKLY WORLD HERITAGE: Moenjodaro in Pakistan

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Click to: riverhouses.org/2020-pakistan

Pakistan in southern Asia is one of our homeschool countries-of-the-week, so why not spend a few minutes today learning about one of Pakistan’s World Heritage Sites: the Archaeological Ruins at Moenjodaro.

The ruins at Moenjodaro, with the so-called Great Bath in the foreground. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

Moenjodaro (or Mohenjo-daro) in the Indus River Valley was the seat of one of the world’s first civilizations:

“The Archaeological Ruins at Moenjodaro are the best preserved urban settlement in South Asia dating back to the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC, and exercised a considerable influence on the subsequent development of urbanization. The archaeological ruins are located on the right bank of the Indus River, 510 km north-east from Karachi, and 28 km from Larkana city, Larkana District, in Pakistan’s Sindh Province. The property represents the metropolis of the Indus civilization, which flourished between 2,500–1,500 BC in the Indus valley and is one of the world’s three great ancient civilizations.

“The discovery of Moenjodaro in 1922 revealed evidence of the customs, art, religion and administrative abilities of its inhabitants. The well planned city mostly built with baked bricks and having public baths; a college of priests; an elaborate drainage system; wells, soak pits for disposal of sewage, and a large granary, bears testimony that it was a metropolis of great importance, enjoying a well organized civic, economic, social and cultural system.

“Moenjodaro comprises two sectors: a citadel area in the west where a Buddhist stupa was constructed with unbaked brick over the ruins of Moenjodaro in the 2nd century AD, and to the east, the lower city ruins spread out along the banks of the Indus. Here buildings are laid out along streets intersecting each other at right angles, in a highly orderly form of city planning that also incorporated systems of sanitation and drainage.“ (UNESCO World Heritage Centre #138)

A wide range of small sculptural artifacts have been found at Moenjodaro, as well as objects bearing the as-yet undeciphered Indus Valley script, thought to be one of the world’s oldest writing systems.

The “Priest-King” statue from Moenjodaro, ca. 2000 B.C. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

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 feature 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.

The World Heritage Centre also has a free and comprehensive World Heritage education kit for teachers, as well as a wonderful full-color wall map of World Heritage Sites (riverhouses.org/2019-wh-map), available for the cost of shipping. Why not add them both to your own homeschool library. 🗺

What world treasures are you exploring in your homeschool this Leo Term? 😊

❡ 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 the WHC’s brief 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 featuring historical and natural sites of international importance. Download a copy of our River Houses World Heritage Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us as we tour the planet, and add your name to our weekly mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🌏

🎵 HOMESCHOOL MUSIC: Relax With Randall Thompson’s “Alleluia”

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Are you feeling cooped up, worn out, socially distant, and positively pestilential? Then you (and your students!) need to sit back for a few minutes, maybe turn the lights down, breathe deeply, and surround yourself with the beautifully peaceful “Alleluia” of American composer Randall Thompson, born on this day in 1899:

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“This classic of classics has become one of the nation’s most-often performed choral works. Rare is the church, school, community, or professional choir that has not sung it.” Thompson also wrote choral settings of a number of Robert Frost’s poems (Frostiana), and they would also make for fine homeschool listening.

What other musical discoveries have you made in your homeschool this Leo Term? 😊

❡ Lift every voice: This is one of our occasional Homeschool Arts & Music posts. Add your name to our weekly River Houses mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get more great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🎵