Archives for July 2021

🌎 🇺🇸 WEEKLY WORLD HERITAGE: Taos Pueblo in the United States

28 July 2021 by Bob O'Hara

Our very own United States is one of our homeschool countries-of-the-week, so why not spend a few minutes today learning about one of the World Heritage Sites of the United States: Taos Pueblo in New Mexico.

Taos Pueblo in one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in the present-day United States:

This Pueblo Indian settlement in northern New Mexico, consisting of ceremonial buildings and facilities, and multi-storey adobe dwellings built in terraced tiers, exemplifies the living culture of a group of present-day Pueblo Indian people at Taos Pueblo. As one of a series of settlements established in the late 13th and early 14th centuries in the valleys of the Rio Grande and its tributaries that have survived to the present day, Taos Pueblo represents a significant stage in the history of urban, community and cultural life and development in this region. Taos Pueblo has been continuously inhabited and is the largest of these Pueblos that still exist, with its North and South Houses rising to heights of five storeys. Taos Pueblo and the people of the Pueblo itself claim an aboriginal presence in the Taos Valley since time immemorial.

Taos Pueblo, whose culture and community are active and thriving, shows many similarities to settlement sites of the ancestral Pueblo people that are preserved in nearby places such Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde. It is nevertheless unique to this region and not derived from Mesoamerican precedents. The property includes the walled village with two multi-storey adobe structures, seven kivas (underground ceremonial chambers), the ruins of a previous pueblo, four middens, a track for traditional foot-races, the ruins of the first church built in the 1600s and the present-day San Geronimo Catholic Church. The Taos mountains (Sangre de Cristo range of the Rocky Mountains) provide the setting for the Pueblo. Within these mountains is the 19,425-ha Taos Pueblo Blue Lake Wilderness Area, a resource of critical importance to the Pueblo’s living culture and agricultural sustainability. The Sacred Blue Lake, intrinsically linked to the Pueblo’s culture, is the source of a stream that flows through the settlement. (UNESCO World Heritage Centre #492)

You can find a gallery of additional photos of Taos Pueblo 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 have you been 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 25 July 2021

25 July 2021 by Bob O'Hara

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.

🦋 The International Monarch Monitoring Blitz is underway this week! Count Monarch butterflies for fun and profit! (Well, maybe not profit. But for fun and science!) Take a look and see if it’s a project you and your young naturalists would like to join.

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is New Mexico, and our COUNTRIES are United Arab Emirates 🇦🇪, United Kingdom 🇬🇧, United States 🇺🇸, and Uruguay 🇺🇾. (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 (25 July 2021) — Today is the 206th day of 2021; there are 159 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 German medical researcher Paul Langerhans (1847–1888) who discovered the insulin-secreting cell clusters of the pancreas, known today as the islets of Langerhans. 🔬 Today is also the birthday of the English biochemist and crystallographer Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958) who played a key role in the discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA. 👩‍🔬

Monday (26 July 2021) — The great painter of the American West, George Catlin, was born on this day in 1796. 🎨 And the most well known of the many attempts to create a universal language for all mankind got underway on this day in 1887 with the publication of Unua Libro, the First Book setting forth the proposed international language of Esperanto. 🗣

Tuesday (27 July 2021) — The inimitable Bugs Bunny made his screen debut on this day in 1940 in a short animated film called A Wild Hare. Elmer Fudd couldn’t catch him then, and hasn’t to this day. 🐰

Wednesday (28 July 2021) — Today is the birthday of the great English polymath Robert Hooke (1635–1703), one of the pioneers of microscopy and the first person to apply the world “cell” to the basic structural unit of living things. 🔬 And one of the most innovative poets of the nineteenth century, Gerard Manley Hopkins, was born on this day in 1844. 🖋 Our Wednesday tour of World Heritage Sites this week will take you to the Taos Pueblo in our very own United States! 🇺🇸

Thursday (29 July 2021) — The seven-mile-long Cape Cod Canal first opened on this day in 1914, significantly reducing sailing time between Boston and New York (and markedly increasing safety). 🚢

Friday (30 July 2021) — Today is the birthday of the great (and largely homeschooled) English writer Emily Bronte (1818–1848), author of Wuthering Heights. 🖋 It’s also the birthday of the American engineer and industrialist Henry Ford (1863–1947). 🚗 Our Friday Bird Families post this week will introduce you to the familiar and diverse Blackbird family. Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦅

Saturday (31 July 2021) — On this day in 1964 the Ranger 7 probe transmitted the first close-up images of the moon taken by an American spacecraft, just minutes before it was intentionally crash-landed on the lunar surface. 🚀 🌕

Sunday (1 August 2021) — Today is the birthday of Maria Mitchell (1818–1889), the discoverer of “Miss Mitchell’s Comet” and the first American woman to work as a professional astronomer. ☄️ Today is also the birthday of the great American writer Herman Melville (1819–1891), author of Bartleby the Scrivener, Moby-Dick, and many other works. 🐳 In Melville’s honor, our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the first week of August, and also our weekly toast, is the perfect little toast-poem “To the Master of the Meteor,” appearing below. 🍻 Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us throughout the year. 🖋

🍻 ⚓️ OUR TOAST THIS WEEK and our weekly poem for the first week of August are one and the same, for Herman Melville’s birthday: the ringing toast-poem “To the Master of the Meteor.” The Meteor was a sailing ship, and the master (captain) of the Meteor was Herman’s brother Thomas Melville:

Lonesome on earth’s loneliest deep,
Sailor! who dost thy vigil keep —
Off the Cape of Storms dost musing sweep
Over monstrous waves that curl and comb;
Of thee we think when here from brink
We blow the mead in bubbling foam.
Of thee we think, in a ring we link;
To the shearer of ocean’s fleece we drink,
And the Meteor rolling home.

❡ Toasts can be a fun educational tradition for your family table. We offer one each week — you can take it up, or make up one of your own (“To North American dinosaurs!”), or invite a different person to come up with one for each meal (“To unpredictability in toasting!”). What will you toast this week? 🥂

🌍 🇦🇪 EVERYTHING FLOWS: The United Arab Emirates in the Middle East is one of our countries-of-the-week, but as a desert country it has no permanent rivers. It does however has seasonal streams called wadis, so our Weekly World “River” is Wadi Siji, which begins near the northern UAE city of Sharjah. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Wadi Siji entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

❡ 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: New Mexico, United Arab Emirates, and More

25 July 2021 by Bob O'Hara

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:

🇺🇸
New Mexico State Flag
NEW MEXICO (the 47th state, 6 January 1912) — The Land of Enchantment. Capital: Santa Fe. New Mexico can be found on page 586 in your almanac and on plates 38 and 142 in your atlas (10th and 11th eds.). Name origin: “Spaniards in Mexico applied term to land north and west of Rio Grande in the 16th century” (almanac page 459). State bird: Roadrunner (bird guide page 80). Website: www.newmexico.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:

🇦🇪 THE UNITED ARAB EMIRATES in the Middle East. Population: 9,992,083. Capital: Abu Dhabi. Government: Federation of monarchies. Website: www.government.ae (in Arabic and English).
🇬🇧 THE UNITED KINGDOM in western Europe. Population: 65,761,117. Capital: London. Government: Parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Website: www.gov.uk (in English).
🇺🇸 THE UNITED STATES in North America. Population: 332,639,102. Capital: Washington, D.C. Government: Constitutional federal republic. Website: www.usa.gov (in English).
🇺🇾 URUGUAY in southern South America. Population: 3,387,605. Capital: Montevideo. Government: Presidential republic. Website: www.gub.uy (in Spanish).

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) have you been 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. 🇺🇸 🌎

🌕 RESEARCH PROJECTS for Homeschool Students – July 2021

23 July 2021 by Bob O'Hara

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:

➢ The Lunar Society of the River Houses (riverhouses.org)

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 252 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:

➢ Sample Checklist for Campus Site S75408328 (ebird.org)

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 have you been 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. 🗞

🦅 FRIDAY BIRD FAMILIES: Cardinals, Grosbeaks, and Allies

23 July 2021 by Horace the Otter 🦦

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 the brilliant Cardinals and their allies (pages 518–529), including the American Tanagers, Grosbeaks, and Buntings.

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:

CARDINALS AND ALLIES — Family Cardinalidae. In N.A. [North America], this diverse family now includes Piranga tanagers formerly with Thraupidae, the tanagers. Also included are various seedeaters including Northern Cardinal, certain grosbeaks, the Passerina and other buntings, and Dickcissel. Species: 48 World, 18 N.A. [This week’s description isn’t particularly descriptive; it’s primarily reporting on how this family has been reconfigured in recent years as a result of improved understanding of the evolutionary relationships of the birds involved.]

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 Cardinal family, for example. How many species? (48 worldwide.) Are there any near us? (18 in North America, and the individual maps will give us more detail.) What are their distinctive features? (A diverse group, mainly seedeaters, many are brightly colored, 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 Northern Cardinal (page 522), one of the best-loved birds in the United States.

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 Northern Cardinal? (8¾ inches long.) What is its scientific name? (Cardinalis cardinalis.) 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.)

Northern Cardinals are among the most popular birds in the United States. They readily come to bird feeders in the winter and have a well-known fondness for sunflower seeds. Their loud, repetitive, whistling song brightens up both forest edges and suburban backyards across most of the eastern half of the country.

If you’re living in the West and miss out on having Cardinals in your neighborhood, don’t despair: the Cardinal family contains many spectacular species in your region as well. Take a look, for example, at the Western Tanager (page 520), a forest-dwelling member of the Piranga tanager group.

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 species this week, why not take a look at the spectacular Painted Bunting (page 526), a southern species so brightly patterned that it almost looks artificial.

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. 🌎

❡ State birds: This week’s family includes the most popular state bird in the United States, the Northern Cardinal (Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, and West Virginia). 🇺🇸

❡ 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. 🐦 🦉 🦆 🦃 🦅

🖋 🔔 WONDERFUL WORDS: As Kingfishers Catch Fire

22 July 2021 by Bob O'Hara

Next Wednesday (July 28th) is the birthday of one of the most innovative poets of the nineteenth century, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1899), a name every homeschool literature student should know. In Hopkins’ honor, our homeschool poem-of-the-week for this fourth week of July is one of his masterpieces: “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.”

Hopkins was a religious poet and he is famously difficult, but if you approach him with the right attitude — an almost scientific, puzzle-solving attitude — you’ll be richly rewarded. If your high-school homescholars can learn to decode Hopkins they’ll be more than ready for college-level work.

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —
Christ — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

Like Emily Dickinson in America, Gerard Manley Hopkins in Britain was seemingly born in the wrong century. The vast majority of his work, like Dickinson’s, was not published until some years after his death, and it was only after World War I that he came to be recognized as one of the great poets of the Victorian era.

Hopkins grew up in an exceptionally creative family, full of artists and illustrators and musicians and writers — a family that was also devoutly religious in the Anglican tradition. Gerard himself rejected his Anglican upbringing, eventually converting to Catholicism and becoming a Jesuit priest, which led to estrangement from his family.

Hopkins’ poetry is considered difficult because it bends English grammar and syntax almost to the breaking point. He likes to change nouns into verbs and he likes to coin new words to express abstract philosophical ideas.

Beginners sometimes think Hopkins’ writing sounds like a jumble, but in fact it’s just the opposite. In this week’s poem, before you even try to work out the meaning, look first at the intricate structure. Far from being chaotic, “Kingfishers” is actually a perfectly regular sonnet, one of the most tightly fitted of all poetic forms. More specifically, it’s what’s called a Petrarchan sonnet, divided into an eight-line octave that sets up a topic, and then a six-line sestet that resolves or concludes the topic. Semicolons and colons carefully mark the elements Hopkins is describing and comparing, and the rhyme-scheme is regular and precise: ABBA ABBA CDCDCD.

But what’s it about? You almost have to translate Hopkins into ordinary English first, to get the basic meaning, and then return to his original text to appreciate how the meaning plays out. This poem expresses an idea in Hopkins’ Catholic theology: that human beings are made in Christ’s image. The octave sets up the idea by describing the lesser mortal things of this world — animals and inanimate objects — and how they all give voice to some inner essence that is distinctive of themselves. Here’s my prose “translation”:

Just as kingfishers “catch fire” (flash orange);
Just as dragonflies “draw flame” (glint iridescence);
Just as stones ring when they tumble into deep wells;
Just as the string on an instrument, when plucked, speaks its distinct sound;
Just as a bell, when rung, rings out its special tone;
Just so, all mortal things in this world express their own inner selves:
They shout “this is what I am — to do this thing is why I am here.”

Now Hopkins makes the religious turn in the sestet: what about us? Do we also express our inner essence like all those lesser beings? We do. And what is that inner essence? For Hopkins the Catholic theologian, our inner essence is the image of Christ and his righteousness. Here’s a prose translation of the sestet:

But just men do even more than these lesser beings:
They act out justice in their lives (the noun “justice” becomes a verb here);
They enact Christ’s grace in their lives — and that is how God sees them;
Christ’s image is reflected (“plays”) in all they do,
And what they do is beautiful to God,
Just as a child’s face is forever beautiful to its father.

Hopkins was a master of sound — his poems are meant not just to be read, but to be heard. Go back from my translation to the original text and listen to how he makes his words “speak” the things themselves in lines like “tumbled over rim in roundy wells / Stones ring” (you can almost hear the stone bouncing off the walls and echoing all the way down); or in “each hung bell’s / Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name” — the line itself almost vibrates like a giant bell. (How many “-ng” sounds can you count?)

Hopkins was not only a religious poet, but he was also quite a nature poet in many ways. If “Kingfishers” captures your imagination, fly over to “The Windhover” next, another Hopkins masterpiece that has captivated many a student’s heart.

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

❡ As kingfishers catch fire: 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 Gerard Manley Hopkins) 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. 📖

🌍 🇺🇦 WEEKLY WORLD HERITAGE: The Metropolitans’ Residence in Ukraine

21 July 2021 by Bob O'Hara

Ukraine in eastern Europe is one of our homeschool countries-of-the-week, so why not spend a few minutes today learning about one of Ukraine’s World Heritage Sites: the Residence of the Bukovinian and Dalmatian Metropolitans.

“Metropolitans” in the Eastern Orthodox churches are high-ranking clerical officials, similar to archbishops in the West:

The Residence of Bukovinian and Dalmatian Metropolitans represents a masterful synergy of architectural styles built by Czech architect Josef Hlavka from 1864 to 1882. The property, an outstanding example of 19th-century historicist architecture, also includes a seminary and monastery and is dominated by the domed, cruciform Seminary Church with a garden and park. The complex expresses architectural and cultural influences from the Byzantine period onward and embodies the powerful presence of the Orthodox Church during Habsburg rule, reflecting the Austro-Hungarian Empire policy of religious tolerance.

Situated within the boundaries of the town of Chernivtsi, on the river promontory named Mount Dominic, the architectural ensemble comprises the former Residence of the Metropolitans with its St. Ivan of Suceava Chapel; the former seminary and Seminary Church, and the former monastery with its clock tower within a garden and landscaped park. The Residence, with a dramatic fusion of architectural references, expresses the 19th century cultural identity of the Orthodox Church within the Austro-Hungarian Empire…. In the 19th century, historicist architecture could convey messages about its purpose and the Residence of Bukovinian and Dalmatian Metropolitans is an excellent example. (UNESCO World Heritage Centre #1330)

The buildings that make up this historic site are now a part of Ukraine’s Chernivtsi University.

You can find a gallery of additional photos of the Residence of the Bukovinian and Dalmatian Metropolitans on the World Heritage Centre’s website.

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

🔎 HOMESCHOOL RESEARCH & NEWS – July 2021

20 July 2021 by Bob O'Hara

On the third Tuesday of each month we post a quick roundup of some recent academic publications and news about homeschooling, offered for your interest. These are typically university research papers, and they may have a positive, negative, or neutral outlook on home education. The title links generally point to the full text of each publication, which is often a printable pdf file. In some cases, a paid subscription may be required to read the whole article. The article abstracts or introductions below are quoted in full whenever possible, without editing.

In addition to the academic papers below, readers may also be interested in a newspaper op-ed by Michael Donnelly of the Home School Legal Defense Association, “UN Agency Attacks Homeschooling,” which reports on an anti-homeschool push by officials in Brazil: “UNICEF’s top education officer in Brazil has launched a vituperative attack on homeschooling, opposing a proposed law that would recognize home education as a legal option for Brazilian parents.”

We have five regular items this month.

(1) Early Literacy: An Online Guide for Homeschool Parents — S.M. Hodgson (2021)

Abridged Abstract: The purpose of this project was to create a digital early literacy guide for homeschool parents to use when teaching their children early literacy skills. In this guide, content is presented without using technical jargon. After reviewing the audience and content that needed to be covered, it was decided that a combination of images, written content, videos, and narration would be used within each section of the learning module. Narration along with the on-screen text allowed the parents to understand the content and made it more accessible to individuals with different learning preferences. The guide was broken down into four main sections with additional subsections for interactivity and engagement.

Twenty current homeschooling parents were invited to take part in this study along with the recruitment flyer being posted on Facebook to obtain extra participants. From both groups, 27 voluntarily participated and completed the feedback survey. Seventeen participants came from Facebook and 10 came from the school of partnership. The study involved participants accessing the Early Literacy Guide for Homeschool Parents through a weblink, then participants were asked to participate in a feedback survey. The survey consisted of 7 questions with 3 multiple choice and 4 short answer.

In analysis of the data the participants reactions and opinions regarding the Early Literacy Guide were largely positive. All 27 participants (100%) agreed that they found the content organized, that it helped them to understand the early literacy skills better and that they feel that they are able to apply the lessons learned.

(2) Homeschool Music Education: A Descriptive Study — A. Murphy (2021)

Abstract: All people deserve access to quality, affordable music education. However, without participation in local public and private schools, this is not guaranteed to be accessible to children. This study explores where homeschool families obtain music curricula, parents’ perceptions of their chosen music curricula, and parents’ musical values in relation to the National Core Arts Standards (NCAS). Results suggest that homeschool families primarily obtain music curriculum from websites, apps and other technology, the library, and private lessons. Parents in this study value all of the NCAS but most highly value creating, listening, and responding to music. Quite often their chosen music curricula do not have opportunities for creating music. In addition, homeschool families appear to be piecemealing music experiences rather than using one complete music curriculum with goals, objectives, standards, and assessments. Therefore, it is my recommendation that the music education community work together with the homeschool community to create a homeschool music curriculum that meets all of the NCAS and provides flexibility for homeschool families based on personal choice. The present study offers insight into the homeschool music experience in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States and is a building block for more research, both within this community and beyond to the national level.

(3) All Education is Spiritual and Ergo Homeschooling is Resurging — B.D. Ray (2021)

Abstract: All education is spiritual and ergo homeschooling is resurging. Parent-directed, family- and home-based private education schooling – that is, homeschooling – is millennia old and has experienced a notable renascence around the world during the past 40 years. With respect to homeschooling, “Parent-directed means the parents have deliberately chosen to take responsibility for the education of their children, controlling both the education process and the curriculum (course of study). Family-based means the center of educational gravity is the home, with other resources being secondary” (homeschoolingbackgrounder.com, 2020). One of the key reasons that home education is growing is that more parents and more of the general public are recognizing that all education of children deals with values, beliefs, and, ultimately, an overall worldview (Weltanschauung). Because worldview is a comprehensive conception or apprehension of the world, especially from a specific standpoint, it is, de facto, spiritual. This paper shows that all education and schooling is the teaching, training, and indoctrination of children, that the worldwide rebirth of home education came with a focus on spirituality, that empirical evidence shows that all education is spiritual and spirituality is motivating many homeschoolers, and, finally, that scholarly theoretical arguments against homeschooling involve the spiritual.

(4) The Experiences of Homeschooling Parents with Mathematics — R. Reaburn (2021)

Abstract: Homeschooling, where parents take on the prime responsibility for their children’s education, is a growing phenomenon in Australia. Homeschooling is different from distance education or the education at home that has taken place in the Covid-19 pandemic in that the parents make all the decisions about their children’s education, including planning, implementation and assessment. This study examined the experiences of homeschooling parents in the field of mathematics and adds to the sparse literature in this area. The study investigated the parents’ own experiences of mathematics at school, their confidence in their role as parents of learners of mathematics, and their beliefs about the nature of mathematics and its teaching. It was found that the parents were mixed in their views about the nature of mathematics and how mathematics should be taught, were confident in their role as the parent of mathematics learners, and had good knowledge of their children’s mathematics learning.

(5) The Concept, Status and Necessity of Homeschooling in the Iranian Education System — B. Soleimani et al. (2021)

Abstract: Homeschooling is going through its early stages in the Iranian education system. There are many ambiguities in the application of this approach at present. Hence, in this article, the concept, status, and necessity of homeschooling in the Iranian education system were scrutinized. To this end, foreign documents belonging to the years 1976–2018 and domestic works belonging to the years 1991–2017 were probed. More specifically, 98 studies were systematically selected, content analyzed and categorized using the synthetic method. Then a combination of findings was presented according to the principles of data integration, reconsideration, and rearrangement. At the end of each section, aggregation of findings and overall conclusions, if necessary, were provided. The results showed that parent-supervised education of children and flexible curricula were essential concepts in homeschooling. This approach has developed abroad significantly due to educational reasons and its outstanding values. However, its position in Iran is in a state of uncertainty. Nonetheless, special attention should be paid to its use because of the following disadvantages of the Iranian education system: 1) inefficiency of the education system; 2) educational inequality; 3) centralized and bureaucratic education system; 4) traditional teaching methods; 5) subject-centered curriculum; 6) contradictory values in homes and schools.

What interesting homeschool news and research have you come across this Hercules Term? 👩🏻‍🎓

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

❡ Explore more: For a comprehensive review of homeschooling research prior to 2020, see the paper by Kunzman and Gaither that is linked as the first item in our Research & News post for July 2020. 📖

❡ Stay in the loop: This is one of our regular Homeschool Research & News posts. Add your name to our weekly mailing list and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🗞

🚀 🌕 APOLLO 11 MOON LANDING Resources for Your Homeschool

18 July 2021 by Bob O'Hara

This Tuesday (July 20th) is the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, a momentous event in human history that every homeschooler should know about. Here’s a roundup of some great Apollo resources you can share this week with your students.

If you watch just one thing as a family event, I highly recommend the 2019 documentary called simply “Apollo 11.” It’s a full-length film that was produced almost entirely from rarely-seen footage kept by the National Archives in Washington, and it’s available online from services like Amazon Prime:

NASA of course has a wide selection of Apollo Program materials available that are suitable for homeschool use (even a printable crossword puzzle):

➢ Apollo Program Resources (nasa.gov)

The website Space.com also has an excellent review of the whole series of Apollo missions with many video clips and links to additional information. It was prepared in 2019 for Apollo 11’s fiftieth anniversary:

➢ Apollo 11 at 50: A Complete Guide to the Historic Moon Landing (space.com)

For little kids, here’s a wonderful five-minute animated version of the whole Apollo 11 mission, also prepared for the fiftieth anniversary and narrated by Apollo 11 astronaut Mike Collins himself:

And here’s an excellent 28-minute official Apollo 11 documentary from 1969:

➢ The Eagle Has Landed: The Flight of Apollo 11 (archives.gov)

Your students can also watch the complete 20-minute video of the descent sequence from lunar orbit to the moon’s surface. For anyone who is technically inclined, this footage is quite gripping. Many people don’t remember that the lander had only about 30 seconds of fuel left when it finally touched down because several last-minute course corrections had to be made:

In 2019 the U.S. Postal Service issued some beautiful Apollo anniversary stamps, but they unfortunately don’t seem to be available for general sale any more, although collector sites still carry them:

Commemorative 2019 stamp marking the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The landing site in the Sea of Tranquility, which you can locate on a clear night with binoculars, is indicated by a dot. The big rayed crater in the lower left is called Tycho; it’s about 50 miles across and is estimated to be about 100 million years old. (Image: Mystic Stamp Company.)

And I’d say your students should be able to recognize the source of the astronaut image on those stamps as part of their cultural, historical, and scientific education. It’s one of the most famous images in history: Neil Armstrong’s photograph of Buzz Aldrin standing on the lunar surface, taken this week in 1969 with one of the 70 mm Hasselblad cameras that were used on all the Apollo missions. (No digital photography back then, you know — the rolls of film had to come back to earth and get developed in a tank before anyone would know what the pictures looked like.)

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface, 20 July 1969, with his crewmate Neil Armstrong and the lunar module reflected in his visor. (Image: National Archives.)

How will you be celebrating and studying this historic, scientific, and astronomic anniversary in your homeschool this week? 😊

❡ The Eagle has landed: If you turn to plate 123 in your recommended homeschool atlas (10th or 11th ed.) you’ll be able to locate the Sea of Tranquility where the Apollo 11 lander touched down for the first time. (Did you know your atlas has maps of the moon? It does, and they’re beautiful!) 🌕

❡ Watchers of the skies: This is one of our regular Homeschool Astronomy posts. Add your name to our free River Houses mailing list and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox every week. 🔭

🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 18 July 2021

18 July 2021 by Bob O'Hara

🕯️ IT’S NATIONAL MOTH WEEK!

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Oklahoma, and our COUNTRIES are Turkmenistan 🇹🇲, Tuvalu 🇹🇻, Uganda 🇺🇬, and Ukraine 🇺🇦. (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 at its first quarter — 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 (18 July 2021) — Today is the 199th day of 2021; there are 166 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 Great Fire of Rome broke out on this day in the year 64. Over the next six days it destroyed much of the city. Some reports (which may or may not be true) claimed that the Emperor Nero entertained himself by playing the lyre as he watched the city go up in flames. 🔥 On this day in 1863 during the American Civil War, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, a regiment made up almost entirely of African-American soldiers, attempted unsuccessfully to capture Fort Wagner near Charleston, South Carolina. Their story was dramatized in the 1989 film Glory. ⚔️

Monday (19 July 2021) — The first national convention on women’s rights, the two-day Seneca Falls Convention, opened on this day in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York. ⚖️

Tuesday (20 July 2021) — Today is the birthday of the Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel (1822–1884), the father of modern genetics. 🌼 And on this day in 1969, the Apollo 11 lunar module set down on the Sea of Tranquility and American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first human beings ever to walk on the moon (while command module pilot Michael Collins continued to orbit overhead). 👨‍🚀👨‍🚀👨‍🚀 🌎 🚀 🌕

Wednesday (21 July 2021) — The American novelist and Nobel laureate Ernest Hemingway was born on this day in 1899. 🖋 And the lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth, −128.6 ºF (−89.2 ºC), was measured on this day in 1983 at the Soviet Vostok Station in Antarctica. ❄️ And our Wednesday tour of World Heritage Sites this week will take you to the Residence of Bukovinian and Dalmatian Metropolitans in Ukraine. 🇺🇦

Thursday (22 July 2021) — On this day in 1793, the Scottish explorer Alexander Mackenzie (1764–1820) reached the Pacific Ocean near present-day Bella Coola, British Columbia, having completed the first transcontinental crossing of North America. 🇨🇦 Our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the fourth week of the month is Gerard Manley Hopkins’ intricate masterpiece “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” for Hopkins’ upcoming birthday and the halcyon days of summer. 🔔 Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us throughout the year. 🖋

Friday (23 July 2021) — The International Monarch Monitoring Blitz is underway this from today through the 1st of August! Count Monarch butterflies for fun and profit! (Well, maybe not profit. But for fun and science!) 🦋 On this day in 1995, what would become one of the brightest comets of the twentieth century was discovered independently by American astronomers Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp. Comet Hale–Bopp was visible to the naked eye through much of 1996 and 1997, but if you missed it, you’re out of luck, because it won’t be back for another 2500 years. ☄️ Our Friday Bird Families post this week will introduce you to the the colorful Cardinals and their allies. Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦅

Saturday (24 July 2021) — Today is the birthday of “The Liberator,” Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), one of the most important figures in the history of Latin America. Bolívar played a central role in establishing the independence of Bolivia (which was named for him), Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, and Venezuela. 🇧🇴 On this day in 1847, a group of Mormon pioneers under the leadership of Brigham Young arrived in the Salt Lake Valley and established the settlement that became Salt Lake City, Utah. 🏞

Sunday (25 July 2021) — Today is the birthday of the German medical researcher Paul Langerhans (1847–1888) who discovered the insulin-secreting cell clusters of the pancreas, known today as the islets of Langerhans. 🔬 Today is also the birthday of the English biochemist and crystallographer Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958) who played a key role in the discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA. 👩‍🔬

🥂 🚀 OUR TOAST THIS WEEK, from John Masefield’s “Sea Fever,” is one of our traditional annual offerings in honor of the first men to walk on the moon, July 20th, 1969. The host says, “All I ask is a tall ship,” and the guests respond, “and a star to steer her by.”

🌍 🇺🇦 EVERYTHING FLOWS: Ukraine in eastern Europe is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Sula River, an important tributary of the great Dnieper. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Sula River entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

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

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