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🌞 🌏 🌕 RESEARCH PROJECTS for Homeschool Students – November 2020

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There’s a full moon tomorrow, so that means it’s time for a report from the Lunar Society of the River Houses. I’m posting this month’s report a bit early because tonight (29–30 November) a partial lunar eclipse will be visible across most of North America. Truth be told, it’s only a penumbral eclipse and probably won’t be very dramatic, but if you have some enthusiastic astronomy students in your homeschool it’s worth staying up for. You can find all the details on the helpful timeanddate.com eclipse pages. 🌞🌏🌕

The Lunar Society (which is related to full moons, but not to eclipses per se) 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 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 recently started documenting a new site, a local college campus that I frequently visit. So far I’ve contributed a total of 63 checklists (observation reports) for this locality — it’s a site that has never been documented before. As more checklists are added, and as eBird combines them and charts them automatically, you’ll be able to get a real sense of seasonal distribution and migration patterns at this location. Here’s a snippet of what that looks like in its early stages, with reports just from September, October, and November:

And here’s a recent 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 (whenever my laptop is plugged in) to three of these: (1) the Einstein@Home project, which studies neutron stars; (2) the MilkyWay@Home project, which studies the history and structure of our galaxy; and (3) the Asteroids@Home project, which calculates the shapes and orbits of poorly-known asteroids. (Yes, those are projects you and your students can really contribute to.)

I’ve created River Houses team pages for each of these projects (Einstein@Home team, MilkyWay@Home team, Asteroids@Home team). Once your computer is signed up to participate you can join one of these teams and you can also print “certificates of computation” that show how much data you’ve individually processed and how much your team has processed — they’re just the thing for your homeschool bulletin board. (And while it’s running, Einstein@Home has a cool screensaver that shows you in real time what your computer is analyzing.) 📡

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


That’s just a simple graphing exercise — nothing particularly profound. 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 many different scientific and scholarly fields, something that would have been impossible only a few years ago. The examples above are just a few that happen to interest me — pay a visit to our Lunar Society page to read about many more projects in a great variety of areas that you and your family can join.

What scholarly and scientific explorations will you be making in your homeschool this Orion Term? 😊

❡ 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. 🌕

❡ 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 backyard night-sky guide 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 that we recommend to homeschool students. Add your name to our free weekly mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get more great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🗞

🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 29 November 2020

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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. Add your name to our free mailing list to get posts like these delivered right to your mailbox each week, and visit our River Houses calendar page (riverhouses.org/calendars) to print your own homeschool calendars and planners for the entire year.

🌞🌏🌕 TONIGHT (29–30 November) a partial lunar eclipse will be visible across most of North America. Truth be told, it’s only a penumbral eclipse and probably won’t be very dramatic, but if you have some enthusiastic astronomy students in your homeschool it’s worth staying up for. You can find all the details on the helpful timeanddate.com eclipse pages.

🎵 🎄 🎅 DECEMBER is Holiday Music Month in the River Houses, and throughout the month (all the way until Twelfth Night, actually) we’ll be sharing an assortment of seasonal favorites — classical and modern, sacred and secular, serious and silly — along with collection of easy educational notes that will help you teach little musical homeschool lessons all along the way.

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Rhode Island, and our COUNTRIES are Dominica 🇩🇲, the Dominican Republic 🇩🇴, Ecuador 🇪🇨, and Egypt 🇪🇬. (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 waxing, heading toward full tomorrow — a good time for moon watching! 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 (29 November 2020) — Today is the 334th day of 2020; there are 32 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). 📚 Today is also the birthday of the American novelist Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888), author of Little Women and Little Men. 👧 👦

Monday (30 November 2020) — Today is the birthday of another American novelist, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain (1835–1910). 🐸 It’s also the birthday of British statesman and Nobel laureate Winston Churchill (1874–1965). 🇬🇧 And on this day in 1954, a meteorite smashed through the roof of a house in Sylacauga, Alabama, and struck a woman named Ann Hodges, who was taking a nap. 🌠 The Sylacauga meteorite, as it is now called, is the only known meteorite in the Western Hemisphere ever to have struck a person. (Hodges was bruised, but sustained no permanent injuries.) 🤕 And speaking of space rocks, 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). 🌕

🗓 🗡 Orion Term 2020–2021 Begins

Tuesday (1 December 2020) — Today is the first day of ORION TERM, our winter term in the River Houses, named for the Great Hunter of the Heavens. 🗡 And December in the River Houses is Holiday Music Month! Keep your eyes and ears open for many musical delights throughout the month. 🎵 🎄 🎅 On this day in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, civil rights activist Rosa Parks (1913–2005) was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man, an event that led to the Montgomery bus boycott and the growth of the American civil rights movement. 🚌 Our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the first week of December is “R.L.S.,” a gem-like homage to Robert Louis Stevenson written by A.E. Housman (1859–1936), for all homeschool hunters, literary and celestial. 🗡 Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us throughout the year. 🖋 And since this is the first Tuesday of the month, today we’ll invite you to browse a new Dewey Decimal class with your students on your next visit to your local library. This month: the Religious 200s. 📚

Wednesday (2 December 2020) — The Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, the oldest Jewish synagogue building in the United States, was dedicated on this day in 1763. 🕍 And our Wednesday tour of World Heritage Sites this week will take you to the Colonial City of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. 🇩🇴

Thursday (3 December 2020) — Today is the birthday of Gilbert Stuart (1755–1828), the famous portrait-painter of early America. 🎨 It’s also the birthday of Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), author of The Heart of Darkness and other staples of English literature courses worldwide. 🖋

Friday (4 December 2020) — Today is the birthday of Scottish historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), one of the most prominent writers of the Victorian era. 🖋 And our Friday Bird Families post this week will introduce you to the oceanic Skuas, Jaegers, Auks, Murres, and Puffins. Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦅

Saturday (5 December 2020) — On this day in 1775, in one of the great engineering feats of the American Revolution, Henry Knox began transporting sixty tons of artillery captured from the British at Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain all the way to Boston, a wagon journey of 300 miles through snow-filled forests and over frozen swamps and rivers. ⚔️ Today is also the birthday of the American journalist and political theorist Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968). 🇺🇸 And it’s also the birthday of the great German physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976), the father of quantum mechanics. ⚛️ 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 (6 December 2020) — Today is the birthday of the great American songwriter Ira Gershwin (1896–1983). 🎼 And Everglades National Park in Florida was dedicated by President Harry Truman on this day in 1947. 🐊

🥂 OUR TOAST THIS WEEK is our traditional offering for the beginning of Orion Term and for the great Hunter of the Heavens. The host says: “Not the laurel, but the race.” And the guests respond: “Not the quarry, but the chase.”

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

🌎 🇩🇴 EVERYTHING FLOWS: The Dominican Republic in the West Indies is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Yaque del Norte River, the Dominican Republic’s longest river. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas (riverhouses.org/books), and you can read more about it in the Yaque del Norte River entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

The Yaque del Norte River near Jarabacoa in the Dominican Republic. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

❡ Daughters of Ocean: 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: Rhode Island, Dominica, Egypt, and More

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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 own 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:

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    Rhode Island State Flag
    RHODE ISLAND (the 13th state, 29 May 1790) — The Ocean State. Capital: Providence. Rhode Island can be found on page 584 in your almanac and on plates 44 and 142 in your atlas. Name origin: “Origin unknown. One theory notes that Giovanni de Verrazano recorded observing an island about the size of the Greek island of Rhodes in 1524. Another theory is that Dutch explorer Adriaen Block named the state Roode Eylandt for its red clay” (almanac page 422). State bird: Rhode Island Red Hen. Website: www.ri.gov.

Rhode Island’s state bird is one of the few you won’t find in your bird guide because it’s a domestic species, not a wild one. All the varieties of domestic chickens are descendants of the Red Junglefowl of southern Asia, a member of the Phasianidae, which also includes the pheasants and turkeys (bird guide page 58). 🐔

❡ 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. 😊

❡ Maps to color: National Geographic has a large blank United States map and a blank world map, complete with flags, printable in sections and ready to receive the colored pencils of your students. Why not give them a try this week. 🖍

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

  • 🇩🇲 DOMINICA in the West Indies. Population: 74,144. Capital: Roseau. Government: Parliamentary republic. Website: dominica.gov.dm (in English).
  • 🇩🇴 THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC in the West Indies. Population: 10,400,027. Capital: Santo Domingo. Government: Presidential republic. Website: presidencia.gob.do (in Spanish).
  • 🇪🇨 ECUADOR in northwestern South America. Population: 16,703,254. Capital: Quito. Government: Presidential republic. Website: www.presidencia.gob.ec (in Spanish).
  • 🇪🇬 EGYPT in northeastern Africa. Population: 101,776,661. Capital: Cairo. Government: Presidential republic. Website: egypt.gov.eg (in Arabic and 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 did you make in your homeschool this Cygnus 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. 🇺🇸 🌎

🦅 FRIDAY BIRD FAMILIES: Sandpipers (II)

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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 are (once again) the Sandpipers (pages 124–161). Usually we cover one or two different families each week, but we’re spreading the Sandpipers out over two weeks because there are so many of them: about 94 species around the world and 66 in North America.

[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 information, the kind of book they will encounter in many different fields of study. Here again is how your bird guide introduces this week’s birds:

“SANDPIPERS — Family Scolopacidae. The majority of these shorebirds have three distinct plumages. Most begin molting to winter plumage as they near or reach their winter grounds. Species: 94 World, 66 N.A. [North America]“

Although some members of the Sandpiper family are large or strikingly patterned, like the Curlews and Turnstones we looked at last week, many more are small, inconspicuous, and difficult to distinguish from one another. (Difficult for us, that is. The birds themselves have no trouble telling each other apart.)

The small species collectively known as “Peeps” (page 134) are not much more than six inches long, and it takes a fair bit of experience to identify them, especially in the fall when their plumage is more dull-colored. As examples this week, why not compare the Least Sandpiper and the Semipalmated Sandpiper, both common across much of North America, but notoriously difficult to identify.

[See attached blog post for images and video]

Biologists call species like these “sibling species.” The birds themselves likely use calls, or behavior, or habitat preference to identify their conspecifics — or in the case of these two species, a small detail like the color of the legs. (Did you notice?)

While many of the smaller members of the Sandpiper family are difficult to identify, there are a few that are unmistakable, such as the breeding-plumage Spotted Sandpiper (page 148), a small freshwater bird that lives along streams, rivers, lakes, and ponds all across the continent — and almost certainly somewhere near you.

[See attached blog post for images and video]

Even after their breeding-plumage spots disappear in the late summer, Spotted Sandpipers are still easy to identify by their distinctive behavior: they bob their tails up and down almost constantly as they walk.

[See attached blog post for images and video]

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 lives near you, or that looks striking, or that has a strange name, and explore.

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 made in your homeschool this Cygnus 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, it can be made solitary or social, 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. 🐦 🦉 🦆 🦃 🦅

🎵 🍽 THANKSGIVING MEMORIES: “We Gather Together”

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Take just a few minutes this week to introduce your homeschool students to a beautiful piano performance of a four hundred year old Dutch tune that is now a Thanksgiving classic.

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Like many seasonal songs, “We Gather Together” has a complex history. The music is based on a Dutch folk melody that was arranged and given verses by poet and composer Adriaen Valerius (1575–1625) to commemorate the Dutch victory in the Battle of Turnhout in 1597, an engagement in the long Dutch War of Independence (from Spain). The modified arrangement that is best known today is properly called Kremser, after Viennese musicologist Eduard Kremser (1838–1914) who built upon Valerius’ earlier work.

Because the tune is so beautiful it has drawn the attention of many verse-writers over the years. The most common lyrics used in the United States — “We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing” — are those of American musicologist Theodore Baker (1851–1934). In the Netherlands, Valerius’ original Dutch verses are still commonly sung. And of course the tune by itself is now a Thanksgiving staple on radio stations and in shopping venues across the United States. Learning something about its history will enrich and deepen your students’ understanding of the musical world around them.

What musical memories have you made in your homeschool this Cygnus Term? 😊

❡ Gobble gobble: This is one of our occasional posts on Homeschool Holidays & Anniversaries and Homeschool Arts & Music. 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: The Church of St. John of Nepomuk in Czechia

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Czechia (the Czech Republic) in central Europe is one of our homeschool countries-of-the-week, so why not spend a few minutes today learning about one of Czechia’s World Heritage Sites: the Pilgrimage Church of St. John of Nepomuk at Zelená Hora.

“Wallfahrtskirche Zelená Hora (1722)” (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

This architecturally important church is dedicated to a Czech martyr of the 14th century:

“The Pilgrimage Church of St. John of Nepomuk at Zelená hora is situated at Žďár nad Sázavou in western Moravia, in the Vysočina Region, Czech Republic. The church, which was built between 1719 and 1727, is dedicated to the cult of St. John of Nepomuk, a 14th century martyr canonised in the 18th century.

“The property consists of a central-plan church surrounded by a circular cloister. It is one of the most original works by the prominent architect of the Baroque period, Jan Blažej Santini Aichel. The ensemble is an outstanding example of architecture of transition between the Gothic and the Baroque styles. The composition of the property is based on the aesthetic concept of a perfect central complex with an explicit central vertical dominant. The centrality of the design is accentuated by the ground plan, which is based on the parallel to two equivalent radials. The number 5, that is a reference to the five stars of the halo of St. John of Nepomuk representing the five virtues of the saint, is dominant in the layout and proportions. The star-shaped ground plan of the church, with five points, is defined by two groups of five radial axes upon which the basic elements of the ground plan and of the composition of the mass are organized. Ten radials, which intersect in the centre of the church itself, determine the arrangement of chapels and gates of the cloister that surrounds the pilgrims’ field situated outside around the church that is situated in its centre. The chapels and the church portals are spanned by ribbed vaults with stucco decorations, inspired by late Gothic style. The influence of this period is also demonstrated by the presence of buttresses on the exterior walls and the pointed form of the windows and portals.

“The main impression given by the interior is its loftiness and the upward orientation of the space. This space is divided into two by the conspicuous gallery at the base of the vaulting. The central space opens into five niches; of these, four are partitioned horizontally and the fifth, on the east, is filled by the main altar. The church retains many of its original furnishings, which include the main altar, designed by Santini and representing the celebration of St. John of Nepomuk in heaven and the four side altars, also designed by Santini and depicting the four Evangelists.“ (UNESCO World Heritage Centre #690)

The church’s circular or star-shaped plan was quite unusual for its day, when most churches were built on either a rectangular or a cross-shaped pattern.

IMAGE_CAPTION_TEXT (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

You can find a gallery of additional photos of the Church of St. John of Nepomuk on the World Heritage Centre’s website.

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/2020-wh-map), available for the cost of shipping. Why not add them both to your own homeschool library. 🗺

What world treasures did you explore in your homeschool this Cygnus 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. 🌍

📚 BOOKS & LIBRARIES: Happy Birthday to Andrew Carnegie!

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We love libraries here in the River Houses, and today happens to be the birthday of another person who also loved libraries: the Scottish-American businessman and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919).

Andrew Carnegie was born in a small weaver’s cottage in Dunfermline, Scotland, and grew to become one of the wealthiest men in the world — the Bill Gates or Warren Buffett of his day. Carnegie made his fortune in steel and railroads, two of the most rapidly growing industries in nineteenth-century America.

By the 1880s, Carnegie has amassed an enormous fortune, and at that point he started giving it away. And his favorite objects of philanthropy were public libraries. From the 1880s into the 1920s, Andrew Carnegie’s fortune helped to build more than 2500 libraries across the United States and around the world. These “Carnegie Libraries” (as they are collectively known) have provided educational opportunities for millions of people in small towns and big cities since they were first established, and they continue to do so today. There’s a good chance there’s one near you:

Over the course of its operation, the Carnegie Library program spent (in present-day dollars) roughly $5 billion, most of it on direct building construction. All the projects had to be proposed through the initiative of local communities, and each municipality was free to choose the style and layout of its library building — there is no single Carnegie Library “type.”

The Carnegie Library in Waterman, Illinois, one of hundreds across the United States. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

So if you’re looking for something extra to be thankful for this Thanksgiving week, why not offer a toast to Mr. Carnegie and his love of libraries, and to the generations of people around the world who have benefited from his generosity.

What educational discoveries have you made in your library this Cygnus 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. 📚

🎵 🏡 THANKSGIVING MUSIC: “Rise up, follow me, I will lead you home”

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During this Thanksgiving week, why not make a beautiful modern classic from American composer Stephen Paulus (1949–2014) part of the peaceful background of your little family academy. It’s scored (I like to say) for a chorus of adult children and their mother, all making their way home for Thanksgiving. This magnificent performance is from the Dale Warland Singers, for whom the work was commissioned. The adult children’s voices begin, and then the maternal voice comes in to answer them at 2:20:

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“The Road Home” has a wonderfully complex history, not unlike the history of many Christmas carols, and that makes it an excellent little artistic lesson for your students. The tune is Paulus’ adaptation of an old hymn tune called “Prospect” that appeared in the shape-note collection Southern Harmony in 1835. In Southern Harmony it was attributed to an otherwise unknown composer named Graham and was paired with verses by Isaac Watts. In 1925, Henry Richard McFadyen (1877–1964) wrote another set of verses for the tune, and that combination of words and music, “The Lone, Wild Bird,” has recently been the subject of a beautiful new arrangement by American composer Frank Glass. In 2004, in response to a commission from the Dale Warland Singers, Stephen Paulus returned to the original tune “Prospect,” created a new choral adaptation, and paired it with another new set of lyrics, “The Road Home,” by his frequent collaborator Michael Dennis Browne (b. 1940):

The Road Home

Tell me, where is the road I can call my own,
That I left, that I lost so long ago?
All these years I have wandered,
Oh when will I know?
There’s a way, there’s a road that will lead me home.

After wind, after rain, when the dark is done,
As I wake from a dream in the gold of day,
Through the air there’s a calling from far away,
There’s a voice I can hear that will lead me home.

Rise, up, follow me, come away, is the call,
With love in your heart as the only song;
There is no such beauty as where you belong.
Rise up, follow me, I will lead you home.

Here’s a wonderful short interview with Browne in which he talks about working with Stephen Paulus and about the process of writing the words:

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And that’s how we came to have this lovely work, which is well on its way to becoming a worldwide choral classic. But you can study all that next week. This week, just listen and enjoy. Happy Thanksgiving! 🦃

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

❡ Lift every voice: This is one of our occasional Homeschool Arts & Music 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. 🗞

🎵 MUSICAL INTRODUCTIONS: Thomas Tallis, Master of Polyphony

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Take ten minutes this week for a lovely homeschool lesson in music history.

[Thomas Tallis historical marker]
Thomas Tallis “blue plaque” historical marker. (Image: The Dover Historian.)
If you’re looking for something to be thankful for this Thanksgiving week beyond the custom of family, friends, and turkey dinner, why not invite your students to give thanks for the life of Thomas Tallis, the grand master of early polyphonic music, who died on this November day in 1585.

Poly-phonic music is the music of many voices. Unlike earlier styles of Western music such as Gregorian Chant, where all the singers follow the same vocal line, polyphonic music assigns different vocal lines to different singers — it’s composed of “two or more independent melodic parts sounded together,” as your River Houses dictionary (riverhouses.org/books) says.

Here are three versions of Thomas Tallis’s ethereal two-minute polyphonic anthem “If Ye Love Me,” a religious work based on a text from the New Testament (John 14:15–17) in which Jesus tells his disciples: “If ye love me, keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; even the Spirit of truth.” In Tallis’ composition, note how the voices are aligned together at the beginning, and then move apart and circle around each other like dancers, and then come back again into perfect alignment at the end.

First, a version by the professional choral group The Cambridge Singers, with the musical score showing the four vocal lines (clicking in the lower right will open the video up to full screen and make it easier to follow along):

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Second, a version by the group New York Polyphony (performing in Sweden) with the minimal complement of four singers, making it easy for students to understand how each person is following a different vocal line — and to see how amazing it is that such a complex sound can be made by just four people with no instruments:

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Finally, a version of the piece sung in its “natural habitat” by a full choir, at a 2010 ecumenical service in Westminster Abbey in London, featuring Pope Benedict XVI and Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams:

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So during this Thanksgiving week, why not turn up the volume on Thomas Tallis for your students and invite them to be thankful that we live in a world that has had such people in it.

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

❡ Little lessons: A thousand little educational lessons are possible with a magnificent piece of music like this. If you have a musical household, you can get the sheet music directly from ChoralWiki. If you have a budding musicologist, polyphony is a very rich and complex subject that music historians have written about extensively — it’s a perfect topic to research on your next visit to the library. And if you are in the midst of studying grammar or poetry, you can point out how Tallis employs special poetic contractions in the text — ’bide (abide), e’en (even), and the unusual monosyllabic spir’t (spirit) — to align the words with the meter of his music. 🎵

❡ Explore more: Your River Houses history encyclopedia has a beautifully illustrated overview of the Elizabethan period, within which Tallis did much of his work, on pages 260–261. It’s just the background you need to do a quick homeschool history lesson. 📚

❡ Lift every voice: This is one of our occasional Homeschool Arts & Music 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. 🗞

🖋 🦃 WONDERFUL WORDS: Delicious “Thanksgiving Magic”

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Happy Thanksgiving to all our readers and friends! During this delicious holiday week, why not invite your homescholars to recite this poem of clever cookery by Rowena Bastin Bennett (1896–1981). It’s our River Houses poem-of-the-week for the fourth week of November, and it may even be about you!

Thanksgiving Magic

Thanksgiving Day I like to see
Our cook perform her witchery.
She turns a pumpkin into pie
As easily as you or I
Can wave a hand or wink an eye.
She takes leftover bread and muffin
And changes them to turkey stuffin’.
She changes cranberries to sauce
And meats to stews and stews to broths;
And when she mixes gingerbread
It turns into a man instead
With frosting collar ’round his throat
And raisin buttons down his coat.

Oh, some like magic made by wands,
     And some read magic out of books,
And some like fairy spells and charms
     But I like magic made by cooks!

Here’s hoping you and all your family have a warm and wonderful Thanksgiving Day. 🍽

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

❡ I like magic made by cooks: 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 Rowena Bastin Bennett) 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 fifty of our favorite friends over the course of the year. 📖