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🌠 JOIN A REAL ASTEROID PROJECT for International Asteroid Day!

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Today is International Asteroid Day! In honor of that important occasion, why not join a real scientific research project called Asteroids@Home, sponsored by the Astronomical Institute of Charles University in Prague. It’s one of the “citizen science” projects we recommend as part of our Lunar Society plan to get homeschoolers involved in the many real scientific research activities that are now available online:

Participating in Asteroids@Home involves downloading a small application that runs in the background on your computer — the Berkeley network computing “BOINC” application — and then “attaching” to the Asteroids@Home project. Then, while you’re working or napping or eating, your computer will be doing scientific calculations on the shapes, sizes, and orbits of asteroids. (Cool, yes?) If you have high school students with a serious interest in science, they can explore the Asteroids@Home website and learn all sorts of advanced asteroidal astronomy. If not, you can just pat yourself on the back that your little home academy is contributing to the advancement of space science. And once your computer has done a few calculations, you can print out a nice little certificate to document your contributions — it’s just the thing for your homeschool bulletin board.

I’ve been running Asteroids@Home on my computer for a while now, and I’ve also created a placeholder for an Asteroids@Home River Houses team right here:

Get Asteroids@Home running on your homeschool computer and you can join! 😊

But why is today International Asteroid Day? Because June 30th is the anniversary of the 1908 Tunguska Event in Siberia, one of the most mysterious astronomical events ever recorded.

U.S.S.R. stamp from 1958 commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Tunguska Event and the work of Soviet scientist Leonid Kulik (1883–1942) who tried to identify its cause.

Scientists still debate what happened in the remote Tunguska River region on this day back in 1908, but it’s generally believed that an asteroid perhaps 300 feet in diameter exploded in the atmosphere and leveled all the trees over an area of 800 square miles. No impact crater has ever been found, so it’s thought that the object vaporized several miles above the ground, although some researchers believe it was following a glancing trajectory and passed through the atmosphere almost horizontally. The Tunguska explosion, if it had occurred in a populated area, could have easily destroyed a large city.

The Asteroids@Home project seeks to increase our knowledge of the thousands of asteroids that orbit the sun along with us. You can contribute to that effort in your homeschool, and there’s no better day to begin than International Asteroid Day!

The Internet provides exceptional opportunities for homeschool students to participate in real research projects in a variety of scientific and scholarly fields, something that would have been impossible only a few years ago. Pay a visit to our Lunar Society page to read about many more projects, in addition to Asteroids@Home, that you and your family can join.

What scientific discoveries will you be making in your homeschool this Hercules Term? 😊

❡ 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 City of Aleppo in Syria

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The war-torn nation of Syria 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 Syria’s World Heritage Sites: the Ancient City of Aleppo.

The Citadel within the ancient city of Aleppo, Syria. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

The ancient city of Aleppo is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world:

Located at the crossroads of several trade routes since the 2nd millennium B.C., Aleppo was ruled successively by the Hittites, Assyrians, Akkadians, Greeks, Romans, Umayyads, Ayyubids, Mameluks and Ottomans who left their stamp on the city. The Citadel, the 12th-century Great Mosque and various 16th and 17th-centuries madrasas, residences, khans and public baths, all form part of the city’s cohesive, unique urban fabric.

The monumental Citadel of Aleppo, rising above the suqs, mosques and madrasas of the old walled city, is testament to Arab military might from the 12th to the 14th centuries. With evidence of past occupation by civilizations dating back to the 10th century B.C., the citadel contains the remains of mosques, palace and bath buildings. The walled city that grew up around the citadel bears evidence of the early Graeco-Roman street layout and contains remnants of 6th century Christian buildings, medieval walls and gates, mosques and madrasas relating to the Ayyubid and Mameluke development of the city, and later mosques and palaces of the Ottoman period. Outside the walls, the Bab al-Faraj quarter to the North-West, the Jdeide area to the north and other areas to the south and west, contemporary with these periods of occupation of the walled city contain important religious buildings and residences. Fundamental changes to parts of the city took place in the 30 years before inscription, including the destruction of buildings, and the development of tall new buildings and widened roads. Nonetheless the surviving ensemble of major buildings as well as the coherence of the urban character of the suqs and residential streets and lanes all contribute to the Outstanding Universal Value of the site. (UNESCO World Heritage Centre #21)

You can find a gallery of additional photos of the Ancient City of Aleppo 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 are you exploring in your homeschool this Hercules 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. 🌍

🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 27 June 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 Idaho, and our COUNTRIES are Switzerland 🇨🇭, Syria 🇸🇾, Taiwan 🇹🇼, and Tajikistan 🇹🇯. (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 (27 June 2021) — Today is the 178th day of 2021; there are 187 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 pioneering African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906). 🖋 And it’s also the birthday of the American children’s entertainer Bob Keeshan (1927–2004), better known as Captain Kangaroo! 📺

Monday (28 June 2021) — On this day in 1914 the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo set World War I in motion, and on this day in 1919 the Treaty of Versailles brought that war to an end. (See pages 370–375 in your homeschool history encyclopedia for an overview of “The Great War.”) ⚔️ 🕊

Tuesday (29 June 2021) — The famous French economist and freedom-philosopher Frédéric Bastiat was born on this day in 1801. 💰 And today is the birthday of the French writer and air force pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944), author of The Little Prince. 🐘

Wednesday (30 June 2021) — Today is International Asteroid Day, marking the anniversary of the 1908 Tunguska Event when a meteoroid perhaps as much as 600 feet long exploded in the atmosphere and flattened more than 700 square miles of forest in Siberia. 🌠 And our Wednesday tour of World Heritage Sites this week will take you to the Ancient City of Aleppo in Syria (or what’s left of it). 🇸🇾

Thursday (1 July 2021) — Today is the birthday of the great German mathematician and polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). 🧠 It’s also the birthday of the German–Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis (1818–1865), “the savior of mothers,” who discovered that deaths from childbed fever could be dramatically reduced by requiring physicians delivering babies to wash their hands. 🧼 On this day in 1863, the Civil War Battle of Gettysburg began. Over three days of fighting, Union and Confederate forces suffered more than 40,000 casualties. ⚔️ And the devastating World War I Battle of the Somme began on this day in 1916. ⚔️ More hopefully, our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the first week of July is William Ralph Emerson’s American anthem “A Nation’s Strength,” for Independence Day. 🇺🇸 Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us throughout the year. 🖋

Friday (2 July 2021) — Noon today is the mid-point of this common (non-leap) year: 182.5 days have passed, and 182.5 days remain. 🗓 On this day in 1776, the Continental Congress passed the Lee Resolution, declaring the Thirteen Colonies independent of Great Britain. 🇺🇸 Today is also the birthday of Thurgood Marshall (1908–1993), the first African American appointed to the United States Supreme Court. 👨🏾‍⚖️ And, the first Walmart store opened on this day in 1962 in Rogers, Arkansas! 🛒 Our Friday Bird Families post this week will introduce you to the Tanagers (and the obscure Western Spindalis). Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦅

Saturday (3 July 2021) — On this day in 1775, on orders from the Continental Congress and a year before Independence was declared, George Washington took command of the thousands of New England militiamen encamped outside of Boston, and the Continental Army was born. 🇺🇸 Today is the birthday of the early American painter John Singleton Copley (1738–1815), who memorialized many prominent figures of the American Revolutionary period. 🎨 And today is also the birthday of the American songwriter, actor, and Yankee Doodle Dandy George M. Cohan (1872–1942). 🎵 One of the most mysterious archeological objects in the world, the Phaistos Disk, was discovered on this day in 1908 in the ancient Minoan palace of Phaistos on Crete. You can learn more about the Minoan civilization that produced the Phaistos disk (and see a picture of it) on page 76 of 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 (4 July 2021) — HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY! 🎆 On this day in 1776, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. 🇺🇸 And on this day in 1802, the United States Military Academy opened at West Point, New York. ⚔️ The great American novelist and short-story writer Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on this day in 1804. 🖋 On this day in 1826, on the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson died in Virginia and John Adams died in Massachusetts. 🇺🇸 And on this day in 1872, Calvin Coolidge, 30th President of the United States, was born in Plymouth Notch, Vermont. ⛰

🥂 📜 THIS WEEK’S TOAST is our traditional offering for Independence Day:

To the memory of the man
That owned the land,
That raised the corn,
That fed the goose,
That bore the quill,
That made the pen,
That wrote the Declaration of Independence.

❡ 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: Syria in the Middle East is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Queiq River, also known in English as the Aleppo River, which flows through the Syrian city of Aleppo. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Queiq River entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

The Queiq River in Aleppo, Syria. (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: Idaho, Switzerland, Tajikistan, 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:

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    Idaho State Flag
    IDAHO (the 43rd state, 3 July 1890) — The Gem State. Capital: Boise. Idaho can be found on page 576 in your almanac and on plates 36 and 142 in your atlas (10th and 11th eds.). Name origin: “Said to be a coined name with the invented meaning ‘gem of the mountains’; suggested for the Pikes Peak mining territory (Colorado), then applied to the new mining territory of the Pacific Northwest. Another theory suggests Idaho may be Kiowa Apache term for the Comanche” (almanac page 459). State bird: Mountain Bluebird (bird guide page 408). Website: www.idaho.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:

  • 🇨🇭 SWITZERLAND in central Europe. Population: 6,403,994. Capital: Geneva. Government: Federal republic. Website: www.ch.ch (in English and several other languages).
  • 🇸🇾 SYRIA in the Middle East. Population: 19,398,448. Capital: Damascus. Government: Authoritarian presidential republic. Website: www.egov.sy (in Arabic).
  • 🇹🇼 TAIWAN off the southeast coast of Asia. Population: 23,603,049. Capital: Taipei. Government: Semi-presidential republic. Website: www.taiwan.gov.tw (in Chinese and English).
  • 🇹🇯 TAJIKISTAN in central Asia. Population: 8,873,669. Capital: Dushanbe. Government: Presidential republic. Website: www.president.tj (in Tajik, Russian, 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) are you making in your homeschool this Hercules 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. 🇺🇸 🌎

🖋 🚂 WONDERFUL WORDS: “It was late June”

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It’s late June, so why not share one extra homeschool poem this week with your students: a famous tiny “photograph,” with sound, from the British poet Edward Thomas (1878–1917).

Adlestrop

Yes, I remember Adlestrop —
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop — only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

This would be a wonderful poem for your high-school or advanced middle-school students to memorize. It has a little bit of rhyme: the second and fourth lines match in each stanza, but not the first and third. Overall it has a fairly prose-y feel because it has a lot of enjambment, and that’s the key to reading it well aloud:

There’s a touch of tricky vocabulary to investigate in your family dictionary. Unwontedly is a beautiful word to learn. Wont is not to be confused with won’t or want, and it’s most often heard today in the phrase “as is our wont” (“as is our custom” or “as is our habit”). The express train would ordinarily go directly to the next major station, so its brief stop at the minor Adlestrop platform was unwonted, that is, un-usual or not customary. And the haycocks that were no whit less still than the little clouds in the sky were not one bit less still, or more naturally in prose, just as still.

The Eurasian Blackbird (Turdus merula) is very like our American Robin (Turdus migratorius) in both its habits and its cultural role in its native territory. And like our American Robin, it’s a familiar singer. Can you hear it by the Adlestrop platform?

More than a hundred years ago a train stopped for just a moment next to an empty railway platform in the country, and a bird sang. And readers ever since have been thankful that Edward Thomas was on that train.

What wonderful words and poetical productions are you studying in your homeschool this Hercules Term? 😊

❡ Making a new friend: When you introduce your students to a new poem, especially one in a traditional form, take your time, and don’t worry about “getting” everything right away. A good poem is a friend for life, and as with any friend, it takes several meetings to get acquainted. Before you even start to think about meaning, take a look at the poem’s structure. How many lines does it have? Are the lines grouped into stanzas? How many lines in each stanza? How many syllables in each line? Many traditional poems are highly structured and fit together in an almost mathematical way, which you can discover by counting. Do the lines rhyme? What is the rhyme-scheme (ABAB, AABA, ABCD, or something else)? By uncovering these details of structure your students will come to appreciate good poems as carefully crafted pieces of literary labor. 🖋

❡ And for that minute a blackbird sang: 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 Edward Thomas) that are suitable for high school students and homeschool teachers. 🖋

❡ Comparative literature: If you have advanced high schoolers in your home academy, one of the best ways to get them to think critically about literature is to have them compare and contrast different works on similar themes. After they’ve talked with you for a while about “Adlestrop,” invite them to read two other relatively short poems: Thomas Hardy’s “Channel Firing” and Richard Eberhart’s “The Groundhog” (which, as it happens, is also set in June). A key point of comparison among all three of these poems is the way they end. How does the ending relate to the main body of the text in each poem? 🔍

❡ 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. 📖

🦅 FRIDAY BIRD FAMILIES: Wood-Warblers (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. 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 Wood-Warblers (pages 452–485), the little jewels of the American forests. Usually we cover one or two different families each week, but we’re spreading the Wood-Warblers out over two weeks because there are so many of them: about 109 in the western hemisphere (the only place they occur) and 57 in North America.

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:

WOOD-WARBLERS — Family Parulidae. About half of the many species in this colorful New World family occur in N.A. [North America] Most are highly migratory; a few reach central S.A. [South America] Species: 109 World, 57 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 Wood-Warblers, for example. How many species? (109 worldwide.) Are there any near us? (57 species in North America, and the individual maps will give us more detail.) What are their distinctive features? (Small, colorful, highly migratory, and so on.)

Pick a representative species or two to look at in detail each week and read the entry aloud, or have your students study it and then narrate it back to you, explaining all the information it contains. This week, why not investigate the Common Yellowthroat (page 464), a little masked warbler with a loud voice.

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 Common Yellowthroat? (5 inches long.) What is its scientific name? (Geothlypis trichas.) 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.)

Many warbler species live high up in the tree canopy, but Yellowthroats typically prefer low brush and thickets, often near water. Their loud and repetitive call — wichity wichity wichity — is often heard long before the bird is seen. The males have the characteristic black mask that gives them away; the females are much plainer and can be difficult to distinguish from other female warblers, especially in the fall.

For a second species in the Wood-Warbler family this week, take a look at the Yellow-rumped Warbler (page 472), another species that is common across the entire United States. Yellow-rumps are highly migratory like most warblers, but they are one of the few warbler species that will occasionally overwinter in northern areas if they have a good supply of food available — bayberries are one favorite in the northeast, as is suet at a bird feeder.

You can do little ten-minute lessons of this kind with any of the species in your bird guide that catch your interest. Pick one that is near you, or that looks striking, or that has a strange name, and explore. For a third warbler this week, instead of a common species why not take a look at one of the rarest birds in North America: Kirtland’s Warbler (page 478). Kirtland’s Warblers nest only in young stands of Jack Pine in northern Michigan, and nowhere else in the world. Current estimates put the total population at about 5,000 individuals.

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

What ornithological observations and naturalistical notes have you been making in your homeschool this Hercules 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 – June 2021

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❡ Einstein Update: The Einstein@Home project, one of the projects that you and your students can join, has just announced the discovery of 14 new pulsars in deep space. Your homeschool might discover the next one. The Einstein@Home researchers have recently posted a new video about the project, suitable for interested high school science students. 📡

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 228 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 — if you join one of these projects, your numbers will be included in these totals:

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 are you making in your homeschool this Hercules 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 Central Suriname Nature Reserve

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Suriname in northeastern South America is one of our homeschool countries-of-the-week, so why not spend a few minutes today learning about one of Suriname’s World Heritage Sites: the Central Suriname Nature Reserve.

The Central Suriname Nature Reserve in the South American nation of Suriname. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

The Central Suriname Nature Reserve is one of the largest tropical rainforest reserves in northern South America:

The Central Suriname Nature Reserve was established in 1998 to link up three pre-existing Nature Reserves named Raleighvallen, Eilerts de Haan and Tafelberg. Through the addition of significant areas in the process, the property now forms an immense protected area covering around eleven percent of the national territory. The 1,592,000 hectares are mostly comprised of primary tropical forest in west-central Suriname, a part of the Guiana Shield within the phylogeographic limits of Amazonia. The Reserve protects the upper watershed of the mighty Coppename River, as well as the headwaters of a number of other important rivers, covering a broad range of topography, ecosystems and habitats. Several distinctive geological and physical formations occur in the Central Suriname Nature Reserve, including granite inselbergs that rise up to 360 m.a.s.l. above the surrounding tropical forest. The eastern-most table top mountain or “Tepui” of the Guiana Shield is located in the Reserve and there is the Wilhelmina Mountain Range in the South culminating at Juliana Top, Suriname’s highest elevation at 1,230 m.a.s.l.

The property is of notable conservation value due to its large scale and pristine state as an uninhabited and unhunted region. Its montane and lowland forests contain a high diversity of plant life with almost 5,000 vascular plant species collected to date, many of them endemic. There are also areas of swamp forest, savannah and xerophytic vegetation on the granite outcrops. Among the Reserve’s 400 recorded bird species are the charismatic Harpy Eagle, Guiana Cock-of-the-Rock, and Scarlet Macaw, and there are viable populations of numerous mammals typical of the region, including Jaguar, Giant Armadillo, Giant River Otter, Lowland Tapir and eight species of primates. Much of the property has yet to be inventoried and the true extent of the area’s diversity is not fully known. Pre-Colombian cultural artefacts and petroglyphs have been found near rivers and creeks in different parts of the property, suggesting a potentially significant cultural heritage hidden within the vast and almost inaccessible property. (UNESCO World Heritage Centre #1017)

You can find a gallery of additional photos of the Central Suriname Nature Reserve 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 are you exploring in your homeschool this Hercules 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. 🌎

📺 HISTORICAL DOCUMENTARIES for Your Homeschool Summer

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Although learning happens all year long, during the summer many homeschoolers follow a somewhat lighter schedule. One of the easiest and most constructive ways to spend your summer educational time (in the evening or when it’s too hot to go out) is to watch good quality documentaries together as a family.

Here are nine documentary masterpieces that you can watch with your students this summer — or at any time of year — over a period of days or weeks or months as you choose. I have embedded the first episode of each series here, but online video links are notoriously ephemeral and they may eventually fail. Subsequent episodes are usually linked from the first. (If you hunt around the net you can also find services that will let you download online videos for offline viewing.)

The best educational approach to follow is of course not to just watch these documentaries, but to discuss them. Students develop intellectually when they have to make mental effort under questioning. What did you find most interesting in this episode? (Why?) What surprised you the most? (Why?) What was the most confusing part of the presentation? What are you skeptical about? (“I wonder if that’s really correct?”) What would you like to know more about?

The documentaries are listed here by date of production, and they are all suitable for high school students in my judgement. Some of course address difficult topics and so may not be appropriate for younger children. If your students were to watch and discuss all of these documentaries in a homeschool setting over the course of their high school years, they would almost certainly end up with a better understanding of history than most college students have today.

➢ Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark — 13 episodes, 1969. A pioneering series on the history, art, and architecture of Europe. This series was the model for many others that followed. (Series and episode descriptions. Episode 1: The Skin of Our Teeth.)

➢ The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski — 13 episodes, 1973. A magnificent series on the history of science and civilization from ancient times to the present, conceived initially as a response to Clark’s history of art. (Series and episode descriptions. Episode 1: Lower than the Angels.)

➢ The World at War from the BBC — 26 episodes, 1973. One of the most significant documentary series ever made, covering the entire history of World War II. (Series and episode descriptions. Episode 1: A New Germany.)

➢ In Search of the Trojan War by Michael Wood — 6 episodes, 1985. Myth, history, and archeology come together in this excellent documentary on ancient Greece and the Trojan War. (Series and episode descriptions. Episode 1: The Age of Heroes. Internet Archive: Complete series.)

➢ The Civil War by Ken Burns — 9 episodes, 1990. A pioneering and visually captivating history of the American Civil War. Perhaps the best American history documentary ever made. (Series and episode descriptions. Episode 1: The Cause.)

➢ Liberty! The American Revolution from PBS — 6 episodes, 1997. An excellent documentary history of the American Revolution. (Series and episode descriptions. Episode 1: The Reluctant Revolutionaries.)

➢ Thomas Jefferson by Ken Burns — 2-part film, 1997. A documentary portrait of America’s most enigmatic founder. (Film description. Part 1.)

➢ John Adams by David McCullough — 7 episodes, 2008. An excellent dramatized biography of one of the most important figures in American history, based on the book by David McCullough (Series and episode descriptions. Episode 1: Join or Die.)

➢ They Shall Not Grow Old by Peter Jackson — Feature film, 2018. A remarkable history of World War I from the director of The Lord of the Rings. The film uses original footage that has been given new life through modern digital processing. (Film description.)

What historical epochs and momentous events are you studying in your homeschool this Hercules Term? ☀️

❡ Come, here’s the map: History and geography go hand in hand. As you watch the documentaries above, be sure to have your homeschool atlas at hand and open. 🌎

❡ Music and more: If you’re looking for audio-only materials, to listen to while traveling for example, don’t miss the outstanding collection of American musical documentaries from Thomas Hampson that we recommended last year. 🎵

❡ Stay in the loop: Add your name to our weekly River Houses mailing list and get more great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🗞

🖋 🏞 WONDERFUL WORDS: “The Swing” for Summer

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Many of the weekly poems we write about here at the River Houses are aimed at high-school–level homeschoolers, but this week’s poem, for the fourth week of June, is just easy summer fun for all ages: Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Swing,” for summertime play.

The Swing

How do you like to go up in a swing,
 Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
 Ever a child can do!

Up in the air and over the wall,
 Till I can see so wide,
Rivers and trees and cattle and all
 Over the countryside —

Till I look down on the garden green,
 Down on the roof so brown —
Up in the air I go flying again,
 Up in the air and down!

“The Swing” was published in Stevenson’s classic collection A Child’s Garden of Verses, one of the best-loved children’s books of all time.

Illustration for “The Swing” by E. Dorothy O’Reilly, A Child’s Garden of Verses (1908).

What wonderful words and poetical productions will you be studying in your homeschool this Hercules Term? 🏞

❡ Up in the air and down: 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 Robert Louis Stevenson) that are suitable for high school students and homeschool teachers. 🖋

❡ Explore more: If your homeschool travels ever take you to San Francisco, why not pay a visit to that city’s Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial — he’s a popular fellow all around the world! 📚

❡ 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. 📖