Archives for 2021

🦆 FRIDAY BIRD FAMILIES: Ducks, Geese, and Swans (II)

17 September 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 school-year’s tour began at the beginning of this month with an introduction to your bird guide.)

This week’s birds are (again) the Ducks, Geese, and Swans (pages 14–53). Usually we cover one or two families each week, but we’re spreading the ducks, geese, and swans over two weeks because there are so many of them: about 160 species around the world, and 66 in North America. Last week we investigated the geese and swans; this week we’ll turn to the ducks.

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:

DUCKS · GEESE · SWANS — Family Anatidae. Worldwide family. Web-footed, gregarious birds, ranging from small ducks to swans. Largely aquatic, but geese, swans, and some ‘puddle ducks’ also graze on land. Species: 160 World, 66 N.A. [North America].

In large families such as this one, your bird guide will also often have separate subheadings for notable subgroups within the family — for example, the “dabbling ducks” (page 26):

DABBLING DUCKS. Surface-feeding members of the genus Anas: the familiar ‘puddle ducks’ of freshwater shallows and, chiefly in winter, salt marshes. Dabblers feed by tipping, tail up, to reach aquatic plants, seeds, and snails. They require no running start to take off but spring directly into flight. Most species show a distinguishing swatch of bright color, the speculum, on the secondaries. Many are known to hybridize.

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 one of the most familiar of all ducks, a species found throughout the entire northern hemisphere: the Mallard (page 26).

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 Mallard? (23 inches long.) What is its scientific name? (Anas platyrhynchos.) What does it sound like? (Quack! But then you already knew that. 😊) 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? How can you distinguish it from similar species? (The text and illustrations should answer all these questions.)

From the illustrations you can see that the Mallard is sexually dimorphic (“two-formed”): in other words, the males and females are different in appearance, with the males having an iridescent green head, chestnut breast, and silvery-gray flanks. A little browsing will show you that most duck species are sexually dimorphic, whereas most geese and swans are sexually monomorphic (“one-formed”): the males and females are similar in appearance, and just by looking you can’t tell them apart.

One of the most beautiful hidden features of many dabbling ducks, as noted in the description above, is the speculum (Latin, “mirror”) — the swatch of iridescence on the secondary feathers, the inner wing feathers that attach to the bird’s forearm. The speculum is plainly visible when the bird is in flight, but it’s usually hidden at rest, unless the bird happens to stretch its wings a bit.

And of course Mallards have provided the soundtrack — accurately or not — for just about every duck that has ever appeared in film and television. 🔊

Browse through the many other duck species in your bird guide and take note of (and delight in) the many wonderful duck names that enrich the English language: Mallard, Gadwall, Merganser, Pochard, Eider, Teal, Canvasback, Scaup, Scoter, Smew, Pintail, Wigeon, and more. And if you want to explore a second species this week, why not take a look at the spectacular Harlequin Duck (page 40), an arctic-breeding sea duck that comes south along both North American coastlines in the winter.

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 will you be making in your homeschool this Cygnus Term? 😊

❡ Homeschool birds: We think bird study is one of the best subjects you can take up in a homeschool environment. It’s suitable for all ages, it can be made as elementary or as advanced as you wish, it can be made solitary or social, and birds can be found just about anywhere at any season of the year. Why not track your own homeschool bird observations using the free eBird service sponsored by Cornell University. It’s a great way to learn more about what’s in your local area and about how bird populations change from season to season. 🐦

❡ Vade mecum: The front matter in your bird guide (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: One member of this week’s bird family is a United States state bird: the Hawaiian Goose or Nene (Branta sandvicensis). Unfortunately, you won’t find the Hawaiian Goose in your North American bird guide, because Hawaii, while part of the United States, is not part of North America! But don’t despair: the Hawaiian Goose profile on the eBird website will help you learn all about it. 🇺🇸

❡ 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. 🐦 🦉 🦆 🦃 🦅

📜 🇺🇸 CONSTITUTION DAY and the U.S. National Archives

16 September 2021 by Bob O'Hara

Friday of this week, the 17th, is Constitution Day! Or more precisely, it’s Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, as enacted by Congress in 2004. It was on September 17th in 1787 that the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia approved the text of the U.S. Constitution, replacing the earlier Articles of Confederation, and sent it to the states for ratification.

The original Constitution that was signed on that day — the actual document — now resides in the U.S. National Archives on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., one the world’s great historical libraries and an important place that every American student should know. As this new homeschool year gets underway, why not take a few minutes to (re)discover some of the great educational resources and opportunities available to homeschoolers from the National Archives — not just on the Constitution, but on a great range of other subjects in American history as well.

[We the People] — The opening of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, 1787. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

For Constitution Day itself, the Archives has you covered with a variety of opportunities for education and celebration, including (of course) the complete Constitutional text along with detailed images and extensive interpretive materials:

Serious history students can even examine George Washington’s annotated copy of an early draft of the Constitution — isn’t it remarkable that this still exists? — with his proposed revisions and corrections:

➢ George Washington’s Copy of a Draft of the Constitution (archives.gov)

There are also a number of introductory videos available from the National Archives showing some of the related documents that were important in the Constitution’s development, all of them now safely stored in the Archives’ vaults:

But there’s a lot more to the National Archives than just the Constitution. They have a rich assortment of materials available specifically for educators (including homeschoolers), such as short recorded presentations, lesson plans on teaching with historical documents (the DocsTeach program), special resources on U.S. presidents, materials on veterans’ history, and much more, available for all grades from elementary through high school:

➢ Learning Resources from the National Archives (archives.gov)

The National Archives also sponsors an outstanding “Citizen Archivist” program that allows members of the public (including history-minded homeschoolers) to help transcribe and analyze historical documents in the Archives’ collections. We recommend this program to homeschoolers as part of our own Lunar Society project in the River Houses:

➢ Citizen Archivist Program at the National Archives (archives.gov)

On your homeschool travels someday you can visit the National Archives and see the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence yourself on display in the rotunda. (I visited a number of times, quite a few years ago, when I worked across the street at the Smithsonian Institution.)

You can also find the full text of the Constitution in your River Houses almanac on page 510 — why not have your students read the Preamble aloud this week, or if you have more advanced students, pick one of the Articles and discuss what it means and why it was written the way it was. At the very end of the Constitution’s text you can see why today is the anniversary day:

Done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independence of the United States of America the Twelfth.

What educational discoveries will you be making in your library, or in the National Archives, this Cygnus Term? 😊

❡ Dukedoms large enough: Have you found all the local libraries in your area? There may be more than you realize, and there’s no better homeschool field trip than a field trip to a new library! The WorldCat Library Finder will help you find all the library collections near you — public and private, large and small — and the WorldCat catalog itself will help you locate the closest copy of almost any book in the world. 📖

❡ Books in the running brooks: The sidebar on the River Houses website has links to several important online library collections that we like to explore. Why not sit yourself down at a large screen for a while (rather than a phone) and give them a browse. 🔍

❡ When in doubt, go to the library: This is one of our regular Homeschool Books & Libraries posts. Add your name to our weekly mailing list and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 📚

🖋 🦋 WONDERFUL WORDS: The Tuft of Flowers

15 September 2021 by Bob O'Hara

Our River Houses poetry calendar for 2021–2022 brings together fifty literary friends we’ll be getting to know over the course of the homeschool year, and we invite you and your students to join us! Our poem for this third week of September, for mowing season and the Monarch butterfly migration, is Robert Frost’s “The Tuft of Flowers.”

Frost is a wonderful poet for younger people because many of his poems have a regular structure and use direct language. “The Tuft of Flowers” is a poem about mowing a field, and its characters are two farmhands and a butterfly. The first farmhand is the narrator; the second farmhand is “off stage” and never appears, although we learn something about him by seeing the work he has done; and the butterfly — the butterfly is the character that brings the two farmhands together.

The Tuft of Flowers

I went to turn the grass once after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.

The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the levelled scene.

I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been, — alone,

“As all must be,” I said within my heart,
“Whether they work together or apart.”

But as I said it, swift there passed me by
On noiseless wing a ’wildered butterfly,

Seeking with memories grown dim o’er night
Some resting flower of yesterday’s delight.

And once I marked his flight go round and round,
As where some flower lay withering on the ground.

And then he flew as far as eye could see,
And then on tremulous wing came back to me.

I thought of questions that have no reply,
And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;

But he turned first, and led my eye to look
At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.

I left my place to know them by their name,
Finding them butterfly weed when I came.

The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,

Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him,
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,

That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,

And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;

But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.

“Men work together,” I told him from the heart,
“Whether they work together or apart.”

Frost is always a careful observer, and his details are precise. Have your students ever watched someone mow a field with a scythe? The video below illustrates the process very well. The man in this scene is performing the first step, which the poem’s “off-stage” character performed at dawn before the narrator arrived: he is cutting the grass and leaving it in rows. Either he or someone else will come back later to turn the rows over so the cut grass will dry and not rot:

“I listened for his whetstone on the breeze,” says Frost. Skip ahead in the video to the 2:25 mark and you’ll hear exactly what that sounded like (along with some “wakening birds around”).

“I left my place to know them [the flowers] by their name, / Finding them butterfly weed when I came.” Is “butterfly weed” an imaginary invention? Not at all. Asclepias tuberosa (butterfly weed) is a common field-flower of the northeastern United States that is particularly attractive to butterflies.

The tuft of flowers that Frost’s mowers saw: butterfly weed (*Asclepias tuberosa*). (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

One reason Frost’s poems are especially great for teachers is that they often provide clear and simple examples of specific literary techniques and structures, examples that you can share with your students. “The Tuft of Flowers,” for instance, is an entire poem composed of couplets — rhymed pairs. That’s a basic term every beginning literature student should know:

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.

Entire poems in couplets are not too common in English; more often couplets are used at the conclusion of a poem or a scene in a verse play as a kind of poetical period. Shakespeare often ends his scenes with couplets, as he does just before the Battle of Agincourt in Henry V:

Now, soldiers, march away,
And how Thou pleasest, God, dispose the day.

It’s mid-September, and summer is now grading into autumn. In many parts of the United States the Monarch butterfly migration is underway — I’ve seen several in the last few days. Perhaps you can find a few Monarchs in an open field near you this week and trace the paths they take on tremulous wing. Who knows where they may lead you. 🦋

What wonderful words and poetical productions will you be studying in your homeschool this Cygnus 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. 🖋

❡ Whether they work together or apart: 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. 🦋

❡ Looking in the lexicon: There’s some wonderful vocabulary in this week’s poem to look up in your family dictionary: whetstone, tremulous, scythe, [be]wildered. Send your students to the dictionary also for any poetical terminology they encounter: stanza, couplet, quatrain, sonnet, pentameter, hexameter, iambic, dactylic, and more — wonderful words, every one! 🔎

❡ Literary lives: The website of the Poetry Foundation includes biographical notes and examples of the work of many important poets (including Robert Frost) 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 Early Jesuit Missions in Argentina

15 September 2021 by Bob O'Hara

(A new homeschool year has begun and so has a new tour of World Heritage Sites around the globe! Print your own River Houses World Heritage Calendar and follow along with us every Wednesday.)

Argentina in southern South America is one of our homeschool countries-of-the-week, so why not spend a few minutes today learning about one of Argentina’s World Heritage Sites: the Jesuit Missions of the Guaranís.

The several early Jesuit mission sites in Argentina and adjacent Brazil testify to the historic cultural encounters between Jesuit missionaries and the native Guaraní people of this region:

The Jesuit Missions of the Guaranís, a serial transnational [World Heritage] property, consists of the ruins of São Miguel Arcanjo in Brazil, and those of San Ignacio Miní, Santa Ana, Nuestra Señora de Loreto, and Santa María la Mayor in Argentina. These are the impressive remains of Jesuit Mission settlements established in the 17th and 18th centuries on lands originally occupied by Guaraní indigenous communities. In Brazil, the ruins of the São Miguel Arcanjo church constitute the most intact and complete structure among this period’s designated heritage properties. In Argentina, the four Jesuit–Guaraní Missions, located in the southern Misiones province, provide an exceptional example of systematic and organized territorial occupation.

The properties’ surviving ruins depict the experience of the Society of Jesus in South America, where there emerged a singular system of spatial, economic, social, and cultural relations in 30 settlements — referred to as reducciones — that included ranches, mate plantations, and networks of trails and waterways extending across the Uruguay River and its tributaries. This particular model of the reducciones also included smaller structures and constructions designed to support the basic functions of the settlements. Together, these elements, each closely integrated within productive lands, and each manifesting the distinct potential and complementary traits of the various settlements and the other Jesuit provinces in the region, inform this underlying interpretation, reflected by the serial heritage property in a singular and specific fashion.

An integral part of the evangelization campaigns, the Missions stand as an important testament to the systematic occupation of the area and to the cultural relations forged between the area’s indigenous populations, mostly Guaraní, and the European Jesuit missionaries. (UNESCO World Heritage Centre #275)

You can find a gallery of additional photos of the Jesuit Missions of the Guaranis 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 will you be exploring in your homeschool this Cygnus 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. 🌎

📚 LEARNING THE LIBRARY: Discovering Local Libraries With WorldCat

14 September 2021 by Bob O'Hara

Tuesday is our regular Books & Libraries Day in the River Houses, and on the several Tuesdays of September — the first month of the new school year — we (re)introduce some of the general library resources that we recommend to all homeschoolers. Last week we started our annual tour of the Dewey Decimal system; next week we’ll have the first of our Homeschool Research & News posts summarizing recent academic work available in online libraries; on Constitution Day (the 17th) we’ll invite you to visit the U.S. National Archives, the home of the Constitution itself; and on the fourth Tuesday of the month we’ll step across the Mall from the National Archives and down Independence Avenue to pay a visit to the Library of Congress.

Many homeschooling families make a tradition out of regular trips to their local library, whether weekly, or monthly, or for some (it may seem) daily! But are you sure you know all the libraries in your area that could be useful to you and your students? There may be more than you realize!

WorldCat (worldcat.org) is the online global service that provides access to the individual collection catalogs of tens of thousands of local libraries all around the world, public and private, large and small. WorldCat also has a Library Finder feature that will let you type in a location and receive a list of all the libraries in that area. In the United States, I’ve found that the search works best using a zip code — why not give it a try:

➢ WorldCat Library Finder (worldcat.org/libraries)

For example, if you live in Boise, Idaho, and enter your zip code of 83701, you’ll find that there are more than 100 (!) school, college, and specialty libraries listed in your area, from the Summerwind Elementary School Library, to the Brown Mackie College Library, to the Meridian Idaho East Family History Center Library.

Before WorldCat, the 750 volumes of the National Union Catalog were the only way to discover which libraries had copies of a given book. Not surprisingly, the NUC was generally available only in the largest libraries: it takes up 130 feet of shelf space and weighs three tons! (Image: Karin Dalziel.)

It may well be that your local town library is the only one near you, especially if you live in a remote area. But you may also discover, for example, that a local hospital has a medical library that could help a homeschool science student, or that a local courthouse has a specialty law library that would be suitable for a social studies project. There may also be small college and technical school libraries in your area that you haven’t yet explored.

Not all these specialized libraries will be open to the public or will have regular hours, of course. But the WorldCat Library Finder will generally give you a street location and contact information for each collection, and if you call and ask whether a local homeschool student could use their facilities for a special project, you might receive a pleasantly positive answer.

Give the WorldCat Library Finder a try and make a list of new libraries to explore in the homeschool year ahead.

What educational discoveries will you be making in your favorite library this Cygnus Term? 😊

❡ Books in the running brooks: The sidebar on the River Houses website has links to several important online library collections that we like to explore, as well as permanent links to WorldCat and the WorldCat Library Finder. Why not sit yourself down at a large screen for a while (rather than a phone) and give them a browse. 🔍

🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 12 September 2021

12 September 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.

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Pennsylvania, and our COUNTRIES are Angola 🇦🇴, Antigua and Barbuda 🇦🇬, Argentina 🇦🇷, and Armenia 🇦🇲. (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 a waxing crescent — a good time for stargazing! 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 (12 September 2021) — Today is the 255th day of 2021; there are 110 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. 📚 This is the traditional date of the Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C., one of the most consequential battles in the history of the Western world, in which the Athenians and their allies defeated the armies of Darius the Great of Persia in his attempt to conquer mainland Greece. ⚔️ On this day in 1962, President John F. Kennedy declared that the United States would land a man on the moon “before this decade is out.” 🚀 🌕

Monday (13 September 2021) — Today is the birthday of the German composer and pianist Clara Schumann (1819–1896). 🎵 It’s also the birthday of the British novelist, children’s author, and WWII fighter pilot Roald Dahl (1916–1990). 🖋

Tuesday (14 September 2021) — The annual Monarch butterfly migration is underway in many parts of the United States this week. How many have you seen? 🦋 On this day in 1814 during the British bombardment of Baltimore, Francis Scott Key wrote a poem that he called “Defence of Fort M’Henry.” We know it today as “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the national anthem of the United States. 🇺🇸 The Soviet space probe Luna 2, the first man-made object to reach the lunar surface, crash landed onto the moon on this day in 1959. 🚀

Wednesday (15 September 2021) — Today is the birthday of novelist James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), one of the most popular writers of nineteenth-century America. 🖋 It’s also the birthday of writer and illustrator Robert McCloskey (1914–2003), author of Make Way for Ducklings (1941) and other children’s classics. 🦆 Our Wednesday tour of World Heritage Sites this week will take you to the Jesuit Missions of the Guaranis in Argentina. 🇦🇷 And our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the third week of September is Robert Frost’s “The Tuft of Flowers,” for the fall harvest, our common labor, and the Monarch butterfly migration. 🦋 Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us throughout the 2021–2022 homeschool year. 🖋

Thursday (16 September 2021) — On this day in 1776, with George Washington in direct command, the Continental Army in New York successfully defended several key positions on Manhattan Island in the Battle of Harlem Heights. ⚔️

Friday (17 September 2021) — Today is Constitution Day! On this day in 1787, the U.S. Constitution was signed in Philadelphia by the members of the Constitutional Convention. Why not pay a homeschool visit to the original Constitution today at its current home in the National Archives. 🇺🇸 Today is also the anniversary of the Battle of Antietam in 1862, one of the bloodiest days in American history, with more than 22,000 Union and Confederate casualties. ⚔️ Our Friday Bird Families post this week will explore (again) the Ducks, Geese, and Swans (Part II). Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦆

Saturday (18 September 2021) — Today is the birthday of the great English writer and lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709–1784). 📖 And on this day in 1793, President George Washington, dressed (appropriately enough) in his masonic regalia, laid the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol Building. 🏛

Sunday (19 September 2021) — Arrrr! It be International Talk-Like-a-Pirate Day, me hearties. ☠️ And on this day in 1991, “Ötzi the Iceman,” a 5000-year-old naturally preserved mummy, was discovered frozen in the ice in the mountains along the Alpine border between Italy and Austria. 🏔

🥂 OUR WEEKLY TOAST, from 1793, expresses an age-old wish: “May public responsibility attach to every public office.”

❡ Toasts can be a fun educational tradition for your family table. We offer one each week — you can take it up, or make up one of your own (“To North American dinosaurs!”), or invite a different person to come up with one for each meal (“To unpredictability in toasting!”). Many of our current toasts come from an old anthology called The Royal Toast Master, Containing Many Thousands of the Best Toasts Old and New (London, 1793). What will you toast this week? 🥂

🌍 🇦🇲 EVERYTHING FLOWS: Armenia in western Asia is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Hrazdan River, which flows through Armenia’s capital city of Yerevan. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Hrazdan River entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

❡ 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 (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. 🌍

AND DON’T FORGET: Friday the 13th comes on a Monday this month! 🙀

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: Pennsylvania, Angola, Armenia, and More

12 September 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:

🇺🇸
Pennsylvania State Seal
PENNSYLVANIA (the 2nd state, 12 December 1787) — The Keystone State. Capital: Harrisburg. Pennsylvania can be found on page 590 in your almanac and on plates 43 and 142 in your atlas (10th and 11th eds.). Name origin: “William Penn, Quaker, who was made full proprietor of area by King Charles II in 1681, suggested ‘Sylvania,’ or ‘woodland,’ for this tract. The king’s government owed 16,000 pounds to Penn’s father, Adm. William Penn, and the land was granted as partial settlement. Charles II added ‘Penn’ to ‘Sylvania,’ against the modest proprietor’s desires, in honor of the admiral” (almanac page 459). State bird: Ruffed Grouse (bird guide page 62). Website: www.pa.gov.

❡ 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. 🖍

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

🇦🇴 ANGOLA on the Atlantic coast of Africa. Population: 32,522,339. Capital: Luanda. Government: Presidential republic. Website: www.governo.gov.ao (in Portuguese).
🇦🇬 ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA in the West Indies. Population: 98,179. Capital: St. John’s. Government: Parliamentary democracy under constitutional monarchy. Website: ab.gov.ag (in English).
🇦🇷 ARGENTINA in South America. Population: 45,479,118. Capital: Buenos Aires. Government: Presidential republic. Website: www.argentina.gob.ar (in Spanish).
🇦🇲 ARMENIA in southwestern Asia. Population: 3,021,324. Capital: Yerevan. Government: Parliamentary democracy. Website: www.gov.am (in Armenian, English, and Russian). (Look at the beautiful Armenian script!) 🖋

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) will you be making in your homeschool this Cygnus Term? 😊

❡ Read and think critically: The country links above go to official websites, which are not always in English and which may well be propagandistic in one way or another, thus offering older students a good opportunity to exercise their critical reading and thinking skills. 🔍

❡ Come, here’s the map: Teaching your students to be fluent with high-quality maps — not just basically competent, but fluent — is one of the best educational gifts you can give them. Why not look up any one of our selected states or countries each week in your recommended homeschool atlas 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. 🇺🇸 🌎

🌟 STAR BRIGHT: Deneb for September and the New Homeschool Year

11 September 2021 by Bob O'Hara

(This is the first of our monthly “Star Bright” posts for the 2021–2022 homeschool year. Print your own River Houses Star Calendar to follow along with us, and add your name to our free weekly mailing list to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year.)

September is the first month of Cygnus Term in the River Houses, and as our monthly star calendar will tell you, September’s Great Star is Deneb, the brightest star in the constellation Cygnus the Swan (naturally enough). Its formal designation is α Cygni — “alpha of Cygnus.” Cygnus and Deneb are high in the east at dusk now, passing overhead in the evening and flying to the west as the night goes on.

Star chart of the constellation Cygnus and its alpha star, Deneb, marking the tail of the Great Swan. The plane of the Milky Way passes right along the axis of Cygnus and this whole area is rich with stars. Our August star, Vega in Lyra, appears along the right edge of this chart. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

If you want to introduce your students to Deneb and Cygnus you can start with some basic astronomy and astronomical mythology from your backyard star guide:

Cygnus lies in what for observers is a dense and fascinating part of the sky. The bird’s wings span the Milky Way at a location packed with stars and an assortment of deep-sky objects. Owing to the positions of its bright stars it is sometimes called the Northern Cross — the northern parallel to the brilliant Southern Cross constellation in the Southern Hemisphere. You will see Cygnus highest in the sky in late summer and early fall, with its head pointing south like a bird on its migratory path toward warmer climates.

Deneb, the alpha star and tail of the bird, is a brilliant magnitude 1 star that joins Altair and Vega to form the Summer Triangle. Deneb is 25 times more massive than our sun and 60,000 times more luminous. (Backyard Guide to the Night Sky, page 216)

That’s plenty for beginning students — your little lesson is done. If you want to get more advanced, the Wikipedia page on Deneb is packed with additional information on everything from astrometry to cultural history.

A wonderful annotated image of the whole region of Cygnus, with its alpha star Deneb in the lower left, and with the Swan “flying” diagonally up to the right. This image has been specially processed to reveal the vast areas of hydrogen gas, glowing here in red, all through this region of the sky — this is not how it appears to the naked eye. (Image: Rolf Geissinger via apod.nasa.gov.)

Deneb is an enormous blue-white supergiant, about 200 times the diameter of our sun. If it were placed at the center of our solar system it would extend out to engulf the orbits of Mercury, Venus, and the Earth. Deneb is estimated to be about 2,600 light-years away, so the photons striking your eye when you gaze upon it were actually emitted by the star 2,600 years ago — when the ancient Greek poet Sappho was composing her lyrics in the eastern Aegean — and they have been traveling at the speed of light to greet us ever since. The name Deneb is Arabic for tail — it’s the tail of the swan for us, but for medieval Arabic astronomers it was usually imagined as the tail of a heavenly hen.

Sometime this month, as the new homeschool year begins, take your students out at dusk and introduce them to this giant sun, and teach them its name, and so give them a new friend for life.

What astronomical observations and stellar sightings will you be making in your homeschool this Cygnus Term? 😊

❡ Alpha and beta and gamma, oh my: Most of the principal stars within each constellation have both old vernacular names — Vega, Sirius, Arcturus, and so on — as well as more formal scientific designations. The German astronomer Johann Bayer (1572–1625) devised the formal system of star designations that is still in common use today. In Bayer’s system, the stars in each constellation, from brightest to dimmest, are assigned a lowercase letter of the Greek alphabet: α (alpha, brightest), β (beta, second brightest), γ (gamma, third brightest), δ (delta, fourth brightest), and so on. This letter designation is combined with the name of the constellation in its Latin possessive (genitive) form: Lyra becomes Lyrae (“of Lyra”), Canis Major becomes Canis Majoris (“of Canis Major”), and so on. The brightest star in the constellation Lyra (the star Vega) thus becomes α Lyrae (“alpha of Lyra”), the brightest star in Canis Major (the star Sirius) becomes α Canis Majoris (“alpha of Canis Major”), and so on, through all 24 Greek letters and all 88 constellations. How bright would you expect, say, the σ (sigma) star of Orion to be? Not very bright — it’s far down the alphabet — but σ Orionis happens to mark the top of Orion’s sword, so even though it’s not very bright it’s still notable and easy to locate on a dark night. ✨

❡ Star bright: The brightness of a star as we see it in our night sky is its magnitude — or more properly, its apparent magnitude. The scale of star magnitudes was developed long before modern measuring instruments were invented, so it can be a little bit confusing for beginners. Originally, the brightest stars in the sky were called “first magnitude” and the less-bright stars “second magnitude,” “third magnitude,” and so on, down to the dimmest stars visible to the naked eye, which were called “sixth magnitude.” In the nineteenth century the star Vega (our August star) was chosen as the standard brightness reference and its value on the magnitude scale was defined to be zero (0.0). Five steps in magnitude (from 0.0 to 5.0 or from 1.0 to 6.0) was defined to be a change in brightness of 100 times: a star 100 times dimmer than Vega (0.0) was defined to be a magnitude 5.0 star. Vega is not quite the brightest star is the sky, however, so the scale also had to be extended into negative numbers: Sirius (our March star), for example, is magnitude –1.5, about three times brighter than Vega (at 0.0). The planet Venus at its brightest is about magnitude –4.2; the full moon is about magnitude –12.9; the sun is magnitude –26.7. By contrast, the dimmest stars visible to the naked eye in a populated, light-polluted area are about magnitude 3.0; the dimmest stars visible under very dark conditions are about magnitude 6.5. The Hubble Space Telescope in orbit around the earth has photographed distant stars and galaxies below magnitude 30, the dimmest celestial objects humans have seen so far. 🌃

❡ And all dishevelled wandering stars: How far away are the stars? Do they all occupy a single celestial “dome” that rotates through the heavens (as some ancient and medieval astronomers believed), or are they scattered through space at different individual distances? Astronomers had long suspected that the fixed stars existed at different distances from us, but early attempts to measure those distances failed. It was not until the early 1800s that instruments and measuring techniques became precise enough to allow the first stellar distances to be calculated using the technique of parallax. Parallax is the displacement in the apparent position of an object with respect to the background when an observer moves from side to side. It’s an ordinary phenomenon you experience every day — it’s how we judge distances as we move through the landscape. Stellar parallaxes are extremely small — fractions of an arc-second (one 3600th of a degree) — and they are calculated by measuring a star’s position against the background at opposite sides of the earth’s orbit, six months apart. (That’s the astronomical equivalent of taking one step to the side.) Vega, our August star, was one of the first stars to have its parallax measured; modern estimates put it at about 0.13 arc-seconds. Apply some trigonometry, and that yields a distance of about 25 light-years. 🔭

❡ Watchers of the skies: Teaching your students to recognize the constellations is one of the simplest and most enduring gifts you can give them. We recommend the handy Backyard Guide to the Night Sky as a general family reference — it will help you identify all the northern hemisphere constellations and will point out many highlights, including the names and characteristics of the brightest stars. Your recommended world atlas also has beautiful maps of the whole northern and southern hemisphere night skies on plates 121–122 (10th and 11th eds.). Why not find a dark-sky spot near you this month and spend some quality homeschool time beneath the starry vault. 🌌

❡ First star I see tonight: This is one of our regular Homeschool Astronomy posts featuring twelve of the most notable stars of the northern hemisphere night sky. Download and print your own copy of our River Houses Star Calendar and follow along with us as we visit a different Great Star each month — and make each one of them a homeschool friend for life. 🌟

🦢 FRIDAY BIRD FAMILIES: Ducks, Geese, and Swans (I)

10 September 2021 by Horace the Otter 🦦

This week’s birds are the Ducks, Geese, and Swans (pages 14–53). Usually we’ll cover one or two different families each week, but we’re spreading the Ducks, Geese, and Swans out over two weeks because there are so many of them: about 160 around the world and 66 in North America.

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:

DUCKS · GEESE · SWANS — Family Anatidae. Web-footed, gregarious birds, ranging from small ducks to swans. Largely aquatic, but geese, swans, and some ‘puddle ducks’ also graze on land. Species: 160 World, 66 N.A. [North America]

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 Ducks, Geese, and Swans, for example. How many species? (160 worldwide.) Are there any near us? (66 species in North America, and the individual maps will give us more detail.) What are their distinctive features? (Web-footed, varying in size, mostly aquatic, and as you can see from scanning the pictures, most have fairly plump bodies, short legs, and long necks.) (And “gregarious” is certainly a wonderful word — be sure to send someone to your homeschool dictionary to look that one up!) 🔎

Pick a representative species or two to look at in detail each week and read the entry aloud, or have your students study it and then narrate it back to you, explaining all the information it contains. This week, for example, why not investigate one of the most familiar of all North American birds: the Canada Goose (page 20).

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 Canada Goose? (30–43 inches long — quite variable!) What is its scientific name? (Branta canadensis.) 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? (Honk-a-lonk. 😊) How can you distinguish it from similar species? (The text and illustrations should answer all these questions.)

Like many other geese, Canada Geese are famous for their large “vees” — migratory flight formations — surely one of the most magnificent sights in the natural world. (Both of the above photos happen to be my own.)

And of course everyone loves Canada Geese because they honk. 🔊

You can do little ten-minute lessons of this kind with any of the species in your bird guide that catch your interest. Pick one that lives near you, or that looks striking, or that has a strange name, and explore. Take a look at the four species of Swans on page 22, for example — can your students figure out how they differ from each other? (They are very tricky to identify — you’re teaching your students to pay attention to fine details here.) Our fall term in the River Houses, just getting underway, is Cygnus Term. Where might that name come from? 🦢

What ornithological observations and naturalistical notes will you be making in your homeschool this Cygnus Term? 😊

🇺🇸 HOMESCHOOL HISTORY: Remembering 9/11

9 September 2021 by Bob O'Hara

Many homeschoolers during this twentieth-anniversary week will be looking for ways to remember and teach about the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. One simple thing to do is to show how other people marked the event soon after it occurred, and so give your students a sense of how it was experienced and responded to at the time.

One of the most moving memorials that took place shortly after the attacks was the singing of the U.S. National Anthem by the congregation of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London at a special commemoration held on September 14th. St. Paul’s is one of the world’s most famous churches, designed by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London in 1666 that destroyed much of the city. It survived the London bombings during World War II and has played an important role in the life of the British people for more than three centuries.

The words of our national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” were written in 1814 by Francis Scott Key on that very same day, September 14th, during another attack on the United States: the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore during what we now call the War of 1812 (which lasted more than two years). You’ll find a history of the anthem on page 521 of your homeschool almanac and on the website of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, which is today the home of the Star-Spangled Banner itself — the actual flag that Francis Scott Key saw flying over Fort McHenry in 1814.

The Star-Spangled Banner

O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Yes, Mr. Key — it does.

[Firefighters raising the American flag after the 9/11 attacks] — New York firefighters raise the star-spangled banner in the ruins of the World Trade Center on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. (Image: Thomas E. Franklin.)

What historical events and anniversaries are you marking in your homeschool this Cygnus Term?

❡ Explore more: The complete hour-long memorial service from St. Paul’s Cathedral in London on September 14th, 2001, is well worth watching. You and your students can find it at C-SPAN online. 📺

❡ National memorials: There are three major national memorials to the victims of the 9/11 attacks, as well as countless other smaller memorial sites. You and your students can visit the national memorials online this week, and perhaps in person some day on your homeschool travels: the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York, the Flight 93 National Memorial in Pennsylvania, and the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial in Washington, D.C. 🏛

❡ Follow along with us: This is one of our occasional Homeschool Holidays & Anniversaries posts. Add your name to our weekly mailing list and get more homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🇺🇸

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