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🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 29 August 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, to wrap up our year-long geographical tour with a bonus, is the planet Earth itself, and our “COUNTRIES” are the Solar System and the Universe beyond! (You can find them in our separate Sunday States & Countries post for the week, which 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 (29 August 2021) — Today is the 241st day of 2021; there are 124 days remaining in this common year. Learn more about different kinds of modern and historical calendars on pages 387–393 in your River Houses almanac. 📚 Today is the birthday of the great philosopher of liberty John Locke (1632–1704), whose works influenced the framing of the American system of government. 📖

Monday (30 August 2021) — Today is the birthday of the novelist Mary Shelley (1797–1851), author of Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). 🌭🍺 The great physicist and Nobel Laureate Ernest Rutherford was born on this day in 1871. ⚛️ It’s also the birthday of baseball great Ted Williams (1918–2002), the last major league player to bat over .400 in a season (1941). ⚾️

Tuesday (31 August 2021) — Italian educator and physician Maria Montessori was born on this day in 1870. Her approach to early childhood education remains popular in homeschools as well as in public and private schools around the world. 🏫

🏡 The 2021–2022 River Houses Year Begins — Let the river run! 🎉

🗓 Cygnus Term 2021–2022 Begins 🦢

Wednesday (1 September 2021) — A New River Houses Homeschool Year Begins! 🗓 Today is the first day of Cygnus Term, our fall term in the River Houses, named for the Great Swan of the Heavens. 🦢 And for this first week of September, this first week of Cygnus Term, and this first week of the 2021–2022 River Houses year, our homeschool poem-of-the-week is our traditional extract from Jonathan Swift’s adaptation of the Roman poet Horace (65–8 B.C.): “A handsome house to lodge a friend, / A river at my garden’s end.” Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us throughout the new (poetical!) homeschool year. 🖋

Thursday (2 September 2021) — On this day in 1752, nearly two centuries after the countries of Continental Europe, Great Britain and her American colonies adopted the Gregorian Calendar: Wednesday, September 2nd, 1752, was followed by Thursday, September 14th, 1752. 🗓

Friday (3 September 2021) — The American Revolution came to a formal end on this day in 1783 with the signing of the Treaty of Paris between Great Britain and the new United States of America. 🇺🇸🕊🇬🇧 Our Friday Bird Families post this week, the first of the 2021–2022 homeschool year, will introduce you to your recommended bird guide. 🐦 Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the coming year. 🦅

Saturday (4 September 2021) — On this day in the year 476, Emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed by the provincial warlord Odoacer who declared himself King of Italy, bringing to an end the Western Roman Empire, which had lasted for nearly 500 years. 👑 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 (5 September 2021) — In response to the Intolerable Acts, the first Continental Congress assembled on this day in 1774 in Philadelphia. 🇺🇸 And on this day in 1836, Sam Houston was elected the first President of the Republic of Texas. 🌵 (Yes, that’s what you get when you search for an emoji for Texas.)

🥂 🎉 THIS WEEK’S SPECIAL TOAST is our traditional offering for the beginning of every new River Houses year: “Let the river run!”

❡ 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, even the stars: The Universe is our “country” of the week for this last week of the River Houses year, so our Weekly World River is the constellation Eridanus, the Great River of the Heavens. You can chart its course in the astronomical section of your homeschool atlas and in your backyard night-sky guide, and you can read more about it in the comprehensive Eridanus entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

The constellation Eridanus, the Great River of the Heavens, flowing from beside the feet of Orion (upper left) down below the celestial equator and into the southern hemisphere. Look at all those beautiful Greek letters! Can your young scholars identify them? (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

❡ Children of Ocean: Why not do a homeschool study of world rivers over the course of the year? Take the one we select each week, 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 this week, this coming month, this coming term, and this wonderful upcoming homeschool year? 😊

❡ 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 BONUS: The Earth, the Solar System, and the Universe

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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. We’ve spent the entire past year on our grand States & Countries world tour, and this week we conclude with the whole Earth itself and the wonderful Universe beyond:

  • 🌎 THE EARTH — The Blue Planet, Third Rock from the Sun. Capitals: 196 of them, listed here over the entire past year. The Earth as a whole can be found on plates 3–25 in your homeschool atlas. Don’t miss the opportunity to go through that wonderful set of thematic maps with your students, covering everything from topography to population to vegetation to climate to transportation to Internet connectivity and more. Your almanac, too, has facts and figures about the physical Earth on pages 385–386 and in many other locations throughout the volume.

A new River Houses tour of the world will begin next month with the new 2021–2022 homeschool year! Print out your own States & Countries Calendar on our main calendar page and follow along with us as we explore the Blue Planet. 😊

❡ Little lessons: You can teach a hundred little lessons with our state-of-the-week posts, 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. 🖍

And now that you’ve spent a year touring everything on the entire Earth 🌐, the whole rest of the Universe awaits you!

  • 🌌 THE UNIVERSE is beautifully illustrated in your recommended homeschool atlas beginning with plate 120 (10th and 11th ed.). You’ll find star-maps for the northern and southern hemispheres, detailed maps of the Moon and Mars, a beautiful chart of the solar system and all the planets, and two amazing illustrations of the Milky Way and the scope of everything that is known. Those few plates are enough to teach an entire year of homeschool astronomy — don’t miss the opportunity to share them with your young scholars today. 🔭

If we lived in a more enlightened age, the background image of the “Universe” plate in your atlas (10th ed., plate 127; 11th ed., plate 128) would be recognized the world over as one of the most significant photographs ever taken, like Neil Armstrong’s photograph of Buzz Aldrin standing on the surface of the moon. It’s an image called the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2004. The image spans a tiny sliver of the night sky, about one tenth of the diameter of the moon, in the southern constellation Fornax, and it reveals more than 10,000 galaxies, some of them approximately thirteen billion light-years away — the most distant and the most ancient objects ever seen.

The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (2004). Nearly every spot in the image is an entire galaxy, not a nearby star of our own Milky Way. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

We hope you’ve enjoyed our geographical explorations over the 2020–2021 River Houses year. What grand geographical discoveries will you be making in the wonderful homeschool year ahead? 😊

❡ 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. 🗺

❡ 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. 🇺🇸 🌎