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🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 30 May 2021

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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. Visit our River Houses calendar page to print your own homeschool calendars and planners for the entire year.

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is North Dakota, and our COUNTRIES are Senegal 🇸🇳, Serbia 🇷🇸, the Seychelles 🇸🇨, and Sierra Leone 🇸🇱. (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 — 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 371–386 in your almanac. Browse through our many astronomy posts for even more.

🗓 TODAY, Sunday (30 May 2021) — Today is the 150th day of 2021; there are 215 days remaining in this common year. Learn more about different kinds of modern and historical calendars on pages 387–393 in your River Houses almanac. 📚 The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., was dedicated on this day in the year 1922. 🏛 Today is also the birthday of the great voice actor Mel Blanc (1908–1989), “the man of a thousand voices,” who gave us Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety Bird, Sylvester the Cat, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, Marvin the Martian, Pepé Le Pew, Speedy Gonzales, Wile E. Coyote, Road Runner, and even the Tasmanian Devil. 🐰

Monday (31 May 2021) — Today is Memorial Day in the United States, the day we remember the nation’s war dead. 🇺🇸 Today is also the last day of Leo Term and the last day of the River Houses academic year. Hercules Term, our summer term, begins tomorrow. 🗓 It’s also the birthday of the great American poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892), who contained multitudes. 🖋

🗓 💪 Hercules Term 2020–2021 Begins

Tuesday (1 June 2021) — Today is the first day of HERCULES TERM, our summer term in the River Houses, named for the Great Hero of the Heavens. 💪 Today is also the birthday of the great English poet of the sea John Masefield (1878–1967), author of the finest thing Herman Melville never said. ⚓️ Our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the first week of June is the anonymous medieval song “Sumer is i-cumin in,” for the beginning of Hercules Term. ⛱ 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 Literary 800s. 📚

Wednesday (2 June 2021) — Today is the birthday of poet and novelist Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), whose works have been loved and loathed by high school English students for generations. 📚 Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II was crowned on this day in 1953, making her now the longest-reigning monarch in British history and the longest-serving female head of state in world history. 👑 And our Wednesday tour of World Heritage Sites this week will take you to the Island of Gorée in Senegal. 🇸🇳

Thursday (3 June 2021) — Today is the birthday of Scottish physician and scientist James Hutton (1726–1797), one of the pioneers of modern geology. ⛏

Friday (4 June 2021) — On this day in 1783, the brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier made the first public demonstration of their hot air balloon at Annonay in the south of France, and the age of flight began. 🎈 Our Friday Bird Families post this week will introduce you to the terrestrial Wagtails and Pipits. Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦅

Saturday (5 June 2021) — The first installment of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published on this day in 1851 in the National Era newspaper. 📰 And on this day in 1989, as a popular uprising against the Chinese communist government was being brutally suppressed in Beijing, a lone man near Tiananmen Square ran out into the street and for a few minutes stopped an entire column of tanks from advancing. Photographs of “the Tank Man” have since become emblems of freedom worldwide — except in China, where they are censored. For a brief history of communism in China, see page 424 in your River Houses history encyclopedia. 🇨🇳 🗽 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 June 2021) — The invasion of Normandy on the coast of France, code-named Operation Overlord, began on this day, D-Day, in 1944. It was the largest amphibious military operation in history and it began the liberation of western Europe from Nazi occupation. For a brief review, see page 398 in your homeschool history encyclopedia. 🇫🇷

🥂 🕊 OUR WEEKLY TOAST is an old traditional, offered for Memorial Day: “May the miseries of war never more have existence in the world.”

❡ 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: Sierra Leone in western Africa is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Jong River, peaceful in the dry season, riotous in the rainy season. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the (very minimal) Jong River entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

The Jong River in the rainy season. (Image: YouTube.)

❡ 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 699–701), 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 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 and follow along with us. 🗓

🌎 🇺🇸 SUNDAY STATES: North Dakota, Senegal, Sierra Leone, 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 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 458), so this week’s state is:

  • 🇺🇸
    North Dakota State Flag
    NORTH DAKOTA (the 39th state, 2 November 1889) — The Peace Garden State. Capital: Bismarck. North Dakota can be found on page 588 in your almanac and on plates 39 and 142 in your atlas (10th and 11th eds.). Name origin: “Sioux word ‘Dakota’, meaning ‘friend’ or ‘ally’” (almanac page 459). State bird: Western Meadowlark (bird guide page 530). Website: www.nd.gov.

❡ Little lessons: You can teach a hundred little lessons with our state-of-the-week, using your reference library 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:

  • 🇸🇳 SENEGAL in western Africa. Population: 15,736,368. Capital: Dakar. Government: Presidential republic. Website: www.sec.gouv.sn (in French).
  • 🇷🇸 SERBIA in southeastern Europe. Population: 7,012,165. Capital: Belgrade. Government: Parliamentary republic. Website: www.srbija.gov.rs (in Serbian and English).
  • 🇸🇨 SEYCHELLES in the Indian Ocean. Population: 95,981. Capital: Victoria. Government: Presidential republic. Website: www.egov.sc (in English).
  • 🇸🇱 SIERRA LEONE on the west coast of Africa. Population: 6,624,933. Capital: Freetown. Government: Presidential republic. Website: statehouse.gov.sl (in English).

These all appear in your current almanac, atlas, and history encyclopedia as well. The almanac, for example, has profiles of the nations of the world on pages 752–859; 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) did you make 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 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 (10th and 11th eds.) 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 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 to get more great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox every week. 🇺🇸 🌎

🇺🇸 MEMORIAL DAY 2021

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Monday is Memorial Day in the United States, the day we remember the nation’s war dead. Why not let some undergraduates from one of the most selective colleges in the country — the United States Military Academy at West Point — assist you and your students in your remembrance this weekend (with words and music from Randall Wallace and Nick Glennie-Smith):

For homeschoolers, everything is an opportunity for learning: holidays, history, songs, singers, and place names. Can your students find West Point, New York, on a map and explain its significance?

Although “West Point” is now shorthand for our national military academy, the name West Point in its original sense refers to the high point of land that projects into the Hudson River just a few miles north (upstream) from New York City. The point forces the Hudson to make a sharp bend, and artillery placed there can easily control all traffic on the river. West Point was first fortified during the American Revolution and it has been occupied by the United States Army ever since. The Hudson River–Lake Champlain–Richelieu River corridor between New York City and Montreal (on the St. Lawrence River) was one of the most contested military and commercial transportation routes on the North American continent for almost 200 years. Plate 44 in your River Houses atlas will show you the location of West Point and let your students get a sense of its geographical importance.

You can also remind your students this weekend that what we now call Memorial Day was originally called Decoration Day after the custom of decorating the graves of soldiers who had fought in the Civil War. The name has changed, but the honorable custom continues, as you’ll see if you visit almost any cemetery across the country in the next few days.

[Decoration Day at Arlington National Cemetery]
Grave of General Frank. M. Andrews (1884–1943), United States Army Air Corps, Arlington National Cemetery. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1882 poem “Decoration Day” shows us why Longfellow was the most popular poet of nineteenth-century America. Why not share it with your homeschool students also on this Decoration Day weekend.

Decoration Day

Sleep, comrades, sleep and rest
On this field of the Grounded Arms,
Where foes no more molest,
Nor sentry’s shot alarms!

Ye have slept on the ground before,
And started to your feet
At the cannon’s sudden roar,
Or the drum’s redoubling beat.

But in this camp of Death
No sound your slumber breaks;
Here is no fevered breath,
No wound that bleeds and aches.

All is repose and peace,
Untrampled lies the sod;
The shouts of battle cease,
It is the Truce of God!

Rest, comrades, rest and sleep!
The thoughts of men shall be
As sentinels to keep
Your rest from danger free.

Your silent tents of green
We deck with fragrant flowers
Yours has the suffering been,
The memory shall be ours.

Longfellow’s “Decoration Day” is a fine example that you can use to teach about extended metaphors in literature. The poem draws an imaginative comparison between soldiers sleeping on their battlefield campgrounds at night, and the rows of graves in the burial ground covered by “tents” of green grass. See how many specific contrasts and comparisons your students can identify (the contrast between the trampled ground of the battlefield and the untrampled ground of the burying field; the comparison between the sentinel guards on the battlefield and all of us as guardians of memory on the burying field; and so on).

What other educational and historical anniversaries did you study in your homeschool this Leo Term?

❡ Stay up to date: This is one of our occasional Homeschool Holidays & Anniversaries posts. Add your name to our weekly mailing list and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🗞

🦅 FRIDAY BIRD FAMILIES: Indigobirds, Old World Sparrows, and Allies

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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. 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 (four different families) are the Indigobirds and Whydahs (pages 426–427), the Weavers (pages 426–427), the Estrildid Finches (pages 428–429), and the Old World Sparrows (pages 428–429). That may sound like a lot, but in fact none of these families are native to North America: all are represented here by introduced and escaped species only, and only one species from these four groups has spread widely and become naturalized across the continent.

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’s how your bird guide introduces this week’s birds:

INDIGOBIRDS · WHYDAHS — Family Viduidae. Native to Africa, these species (two genera) are all obligate brood parasites. Pin-tailed Whydah not accepted by ABA. [That is, the American Birding Association doesn’t consider this species sufficiently established to “count” as a North American bird.] Species: 20 World, 1 N.A.

WEAVERS — Family Ploceidae. Large, primarily African family. Breeding males are often highly colored. Build elaborate woven nests. Northern Red Bishop not accepted by ABA. Species: 108 World, 1 N.A.

ESTRILDID FINCHES — Family Estrildidae. Large Old World family found from Africa to Australia and South Pacific Islands. Most are small with pointed tails. Related to weavers. Species: 140 World, 1 N.A.

OLD WORLD SPARROWS — Family Passeridae. Old World family. Gregarious; two species have become established in N.A. Species: 39 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 Old World Sparrows, for example. How many species? (39 worldwide.) Are there any near us? (Only two species in North America, both of them introduced from Europe; the individual maps will give us more detail.) What are their distinctive features? (Old World group [i.e., native to Europe, Africa, and Asia, not North or South America], gregarious, and so on.) (And “gregarious” is certainly a wonderful word, isn’t it — be sure to send someone to your homeschool dictionary to look that one up.) 🔎

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 Old World Sparrow family, why not investigate the familiar House Sparrow (page 428), one of the most common birds in North America and a species every homeschool naturalist should know. (I can hear half a dozen chattering outside my window as I’m typing this.)

All sorts of biological information is packed into the brief species descriptions in your bird guide — can your students tease it out? How big is the House Sparrow? (6¼ inches long.) What is its scientific name? (Passer domesticus.) Will you be able to find this 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 song or call does this species make? How can you distinguish it from similar species? (The text and illustrations should answer all these questions.)

House Sparrows are common across North America, mainly in habitats that humans also frequent. (About the only place you never find them is in forests.) They will just as happily nest in the eaves of an urban apartment building as in a rural horse barn. If you had explored the United States at the time of the Civil War or earlier, however, you wouldn’t have found a single one: they were introduced in the late 1800s from Europe and by the mid twentieth century they had spread from coast to coast.

House Sparrows exhibit clear sexual dimorphism: in the breeding season the males sport a black throat and breast, gray cap, and chestnut markings on the head, while the females are generally a plainer beige. (The two photos above represent a breeding-plumage male and female.) In the non-breeding season the sexes are still readily distinguishable, although the males are not quite as boldly patterned as they are in spring and summer and look a bit more like the females.

As a second species this week, for fun, why not look at the Pin-tailed Whydah (page 426) in the Indigobird and Whydah family. You’re not likely to see one unless you live near Los Angeles, where they have escaped from captivity and become naturalized in the wild — they are native to Africa and not really a North American species. But that could have been said a century ago about the House Sparrow and they now cover the continent, so who knows….

As your bird guide notes, all members of the Whydah family are brood parasites. They build no nests of their own, and the females spend the breeding season skulking about and locating other birds’ nests, and then dropping their own eggs into them when no one is looking. The Brown-headed Cowbird (page 538) is the only native North American bird that is also a brood parasite.

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 did you make 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, 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. 🐦

❡ Enchiridion: The front matter in your bird guide (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 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 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 to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🐦 🦉 🦆 🦃 🦅

🌕 RESEARCH PROJECTS for Homeschool Students – May 2021

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There’s a full moon tonight, 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 our list of just 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 have been documenting a new site, a local college campus that I frequently visit. So far I’ve contributed a total of 202 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 progress, with reports since last September:

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 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. I’ve set up a simple chart of River Houses team results using an online spreadsheet, 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 did you make in your homeschool this Leo 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 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 and get more great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🗞

🌍 🇸🇦 WEEKLY WORLD HERITAGE: The Ancient Rock Art of Saudi Arabia

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Saudi Arabia in the Middle East is one of our homeschool countries-of-the-week, so why not spend a few minutes today learning about one of Saudi Arabia’s World Heritage Sites: the Rock Art in the Hail Region.

Ancient zoomorphic rock carvings in the Hail region of Saudi Arabia. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

The desert climate of Saudi Arabia has preserved intact the many rock carvings made in the Hail region by traders and travelers over thousands of years:

The serial property of the Rock Art in the Hail Region is comprised of two components: Jabal Umm Sinman at Jubbah, located approximately 90 km northwest of the city of Hail, and Jabal Al-Manjor and Jabal Raat at Shuwaymis, approximately 250 km south of Hail. At Jabal Umm Sinman Jubbah, the ancestors of present-day Arabs left marks of their presence in numerous petroglyph panels and inscriptions within a landscape that once overlooked a freshwater lake; and at Jabal Al-Manjor and Jabal Raat, Shuwaymis, the large number of petroglyphs and inscriptions has been attributed to almost 10,000 years of human history within a valley with flowing water. Together, these components contain the biggest and richest rock art complexes in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the wider region. Processes of desertification from the mid-Holocene altered the local environmental context and patterns of human settlement in these areas, and these changes are expressed in the numerous petroglyph panels and rich inscriptions. The attributes of the property include the large number of petroglyphs, inscriptions, archaeological features and the environmental setting. (UNESCO World Heritage Centre #1472)

You can find a gallery of additional photos of the Rock Art in the Hail Region 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 of World Heritage Sites online at the 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, 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 Leo Term? 😊

❡ Books in the running brooks: You can always turn to your River Houses almanac, atlas, and history encyclopedia for more information about any of our countries-of-the-week. The almanac has profiles of all the nations of the world on pages 752–859; 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 and follow along with us as we tour the planet, and add your name to our weekly mailing list to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🌍

🌞 🌏 🌕 WONDERFUL WORDS: “The stellar gauge of earthly show”

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For the total lunar eclipse that will take place early Wednesday morning we have an extra homeschool poem this week — a River Houses traditional for every lunar eclipse week: the astronomical sonnet-masterpiece from Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) that asks three questions and gives no answers. Why not read it with your students as the earth’s shadow steals upon the moon’s meek shine.

At a Lunar Eclipse

Thy shadow, Earth, from Pole to Central Sea,
Now steals along upon the Moon’s meek shine
In even monochrome and curving line
Of imperturbable serenity.

How shall I link such sun-cast symmetry
With the torn troubled form I know as thine,
That profile, placid as a brow divine,
With continents of moil and misery?

And can immense Mortality but throw
So small a shade, and Heaven’s high human scheme
Be hemmed within the coasts yon arc implies?

Is such the stellar gauge of earthly show,
Nation at war with nation, brains that teem,
Heroes, and women fairer than the skies?

What wonderful words did you find and what poetical productions did you study in your homeschool this Leo Term? 😊

❡ Count and map: When you introduce your students to a new poem, especially one in a traditional form, the first thing to have them do is count the syllables and map the rhyme scheme. How many syllables in each line in this poem? Ten throughout. (And that gives you a clue about how certain words should be pronounced: Heaven’s is one long syllable here, not two.) The ten syllables in each line follow a generally iambic pattern, with the accent on the second syllable of each pair (most of the time). That makes this poem iambic pentameter. What about the rhyme scheme? The first two stanzas are sea–shine–line–serenity and symmetry–thine–divine–misery. That looks like ABBA ABBA. The next six lines follow a different pattern: CDE CDE. By uncovering these details of structure your students will come to appreciate good poems as carefully crafted pieces of literary labor. 🖋

❡ The stellar gauge of earthly show: 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 Thomas Hardy) 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 to get posts like these delivered right to your mailbox, and print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar to follow along with us as we visit fifty of our favorite friends over the course of the year. 📖

🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 23 May 2021

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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. Visit our River Houses calendar page to print your own homeschool calendars and planners for the entire year.

🌞 🌏 🌕 A LUNAR ECLIPSE will take place in the early morning hours of Wednesday this week (26 May). Its area of maximum visibility will be in the Pacific Ocean, alas, but if you’re in the southwestern United States you should be able to see a good part of it. (Other areas of North America will have poorer views.) You can find all the details on the helpful timeanddate.com eclipse pages.

🗓 🦁 This is the last full week of LEO TERM, our spring term in the River Houses. Hercules Term, our summer term, begins on Tuesday the first of June.

🦅 🦆 🐦 MAY is Bird Migration Month in the River Houses, and throughout the month we’ve been sharing an assortment of extra homeschool notes on one of the world’s most wonderful natural phenomena.

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Colorado, and our COUNTRIES are Samoa 🇼🇸, San Marino 🇸🇲, São Tomé and Príncipe 🇸🇹, and Saudi Arabia 🇸🇦. (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 — 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 371–386 in your almanac. Browse through our many astronomy posts for even more.

🗓 TODAY, Sunday (23 May 2021) — Today is the 143rd day of 2021; there are 222 days remaining in this common year. Learn more about different kinds of modern and historical calendars on pages 387–393 in your River Houses almanac. 📚 Today is the birthday of the great Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), who devised the system of species nomenclature that is still in use today in the biological sciences by all of us members of Homo sapiens. 🐟 🐢 🐳 🐒 🐝 🐪 🐞 🐌 🦋 🦉

Monday (24 May 2021) — Today is the birthday of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom (1819–1901), who gave her name to an entire historical era. You can read more about Victoria and the Victorians on page 348 in your homeschool history encyclopedia. 👑 And on this day in 1844, Samuel F.B. Morse sent the message “What hath God wrought!” from the U.S. Capitol building to his assistant in Baltimore, thirty-five miles away, instantly, thereby inaugurating the first commercial telegraph line between two U.S. cities. ⚡️

Tuesday (25 May 2021) — Today is the birthday of the great American poet, essayist, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). 🖋 And on this day in 1977, the first Star Wars movie was released! 🚀

Wednesday (26 May 2021) — It’s National Paper Airplane Day! ✈️ Our Wednesday tour of World Heritage Sites this week will explore the Rock Art of the Hail Region of Saudi Arabia. 🇸🇦 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. 🌕

Thursday (27 May 2021) — Today is the birthday of the American poet and songwriter Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910), author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (“Mine eyes have seen the glory”). 🌅 🍇 🎺 ⚡️ ⚔️

Friday (28 May 2021) — A solar eclipse occurred on this day in the year 585 B.C. during the Battle of the Halys River in central Anatolia, leading to a truce. The exact date of that eclipse is one of the key reference points from which other dates in ancient Near Eastern history are calculated. 🌏 🌑 🌞 Our Friday Bird Families post this week will introduce you to the Indigobirds, Weavers, Estrildid Finches, and Old World Sparrows. Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦅

Saturday (29 May 2021) — On this day in 1453, the city of Constantinople fell to the Ottoman armies of Sultan Mehmed II after a 53-day siege, bringing to an end the ancient Byzantine Empire that had survived for more than a thousand years. You can explore more on pages 198, 206, and 246 in your homeschool history encyclopedia ⚔️ And speaking of eclipses, another solar eclipse, occurring on this day in 1919, allowed Sir Arthur Eddington to confirm Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. 🌏 🌑 🌞 And on this day in 1953, mountaineers Edmund Hillary and Tenzig Norgay became the first climbers ever to reach the summit of Mount Everest. 🏔

Sunday (30 May 2021) — The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., was dedicated on this day in the year 1922. 🏛 Today is also the birthday of the great voice actor Mel Blanc (1908–1989), “the man of a thousand voices,” who gave us Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety Bird, Sylvester the Cat, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, Marvin the Martian, Pepé Le Pew, Speedy Gonzales, Wile E. Coyote, Road Runner, and even the Tasmanian Devil. 🐰

🥂 OUR WEEKLY TOAST is for the bloom of spring: “To love, liberty, and length of blissful days.”

❡ 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!”). Many of our current toasts are taken from an old collection that appeared in Routledge’s Manual of Etiquette (London, ca. 1870). What will you toast this week? 🥂

🌍 🇸🇦 EVERYTHING FLOWS: Saudi Arabia in the Middle East is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is Wadi Al-Batin on the border between Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Kuwait. Saudi Arabia is quite a large country, but it is almost entirely desert and has no permanent rivers. What it has are wadis — dry river beds and valleys that fill with water temporarily during rainy periods. (In the American southwest they would be called washes.) You can find the location of Wadi Al-Batin in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Wadi Al-Batin entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

Wadi Al-Batin near the city of Hafar Al-Batin in Saudi Arabia. The area only fills with water during the winter rainy season. (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 699–701), 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 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 and follow along with us. 🗓

🌎 🇺🇸 SUNDAY STATES: Colorado, Samoa, Saudi Arabia, 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 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 458), so this week’s state is:

  • 🇺🇸
    Colorado State Flag
    COLORADO (the 38th state, 1 August 1876) — The Centennial State. Capital: Denver. Colorado can be found on page 573 in your almanac and on plates 38 and 142 in your atlas (10th and 11th eds.). Name origin: “From Spanish for ‘red,’ first applied to Colorado River” (almanac page 459). State bird: Lark Bunting (bird guide page 498). Website: www.colorado.gov.

❡ Little lessons: You can teach a hundred little lessons with our state-of-the-week, using your reference library 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:

  • 🇼🇸 SAMOA in the south Pacific Ocean. Population: 203,774. Capital: Apia. Government: Parliamentary republic. Website: www.samoagovt.ws (in English).
  • 🇸🇲 SAN MARINO in southern Europe, surrounded by Italy. Population: 34,232. Capital: San Marino. Government: Parliamentary republic. Website: www.sanmarino.sm (in Italian and English).
  • 🇸🇹 SÃO TOMÉ AND PRÍNCIPE off the west coast of Africa. Population: 211,122. Capital: São Tomé. Government: Semi-presidential republic. Website: www.presidencia.st (in Portuguese).
  • 🇸🇦 SAUDI ARABIA in the Middle East. Population: 34,173,498. Capital: Riyadh. Government: Absolute monarchy. Website: www.saudi.gov.sa (in English and Arabic).

These all appear in your current almanac, atlas, and history encyclopedia as well. The almanac, for example, has profiles of the nations of the world on pages 752–859; 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) did you make 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 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 (10th and 11th eds.) 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 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 to get more great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox every week. 🇺🇸 🌎

🖋 🎓 GRADUATION SEASON: “Set me free to find my calling”

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The end of May marks the end of the Leo Term, our spring term in the River Houses, and many homeschoolers treat the end of May as an opportunity to hold a family graduation ceremony. The beautiful song “Homeward Bound” by American composer Marta Keen (b. 1953) has in recent years become a staple of high school choirs around the country and of many other vocal groups as well. The narrator in the song is a young person asking permission to leave home, and promising to return. We think “Homeward Bound” is an ideal spring-time graduation anthem for every home academy. The words are our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the last week of May:

Homeward Bound

In the quiet misty morning, when the moon has gone to bed,
When the sparrows stop their singing and the sky is clear and red,
When the summer’s ceased its gleaming, when the corn is past its prime,
When adventure’s lost its meaning, I’ll be homeward bound in time.

Bind me not to the pasture, chain me not to the plow,
Set me free to find my calling and I’ll return to you somehow.

If you find it’s me you’re missing, if you’re hoping I’ll return,
To your thoughts I’ll soon be list’ning; in the road I’ll stop and turn,
Then the wind will set me racing as my journey nears its end,
And the path I’ll be retracing when I’m homeward bound again.

Bind me not to the pasture, chain me not to the plow,
Set me free to find my calling and I’ll return to you somehow.

In the quiet misty morning when the moon has gone to bed,
When the sparrows stop their singing, I’ll be homeward bound again.

Here’s a fine video performance by the Brigham Young University student ensemble Vocal Point, accompanied by the All-American Boys Chorus:

Or perhaps instead of an all-male performance, you’d prefer the all-female Ballard High School Treble Choir from Seattle:

Or, if you’d like a more Classical rendition, try this resonant recording from the great Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, produced by Deutsche Grammophon:

Or maybe best of all — and an inspiration for any young singers you may have in your home academy — here’s a delightful performance by the Texas Children’s Choir in San Antonio:

What other wonderful words and marvelous music did you discover in your homeschool this Leo Term? 😊

❡ I’ll be homeward bound in time: 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. Add your name to our River Houses mailing list to get posts like these delivered right to your mailbox, and print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar to follow along with us as we visit fifty of our favorite friends over the course of the year. 📖