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🎵 🎉 HOLIDAY MUSIC MONTH: The Old Year Now Away is Fled

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For educational homeschool entertainment this New Year’s Day, why not invite your students to listen to the great countertenor Alfred Deller singing, in true Renaissance style, an ancient carol that dates back at least as far as the 1640s, set to what is probably the most famous of all folk-tunes, “Greensleeves”:

We’re approaching the end of our Homeschool Holiday Music Month in the River Houses — it began on the first of December and will conclude this coming Wednesday on Twelfth Night (January 5th). Throughout the month we’ve been sharing an assortment of seasonal favorites in a great variety of styles and genres — classical and modern, sacred and secular, serious and silly — along with a collection of easy educational notes to help you teach little musical lessons all along the way.

Alfred Deller (1912–1979) was a key figure in the twentieth-century revival of authentic early music performance. He sang naturally as a countertenor — the highest male vocal register, overlapping the female contralto and mezzo-soprano registers — and he recreated for new audiences the popular singing styles of the Shakespearean era.

Carol for New Year’s Day

The old year now away is fled,
The new year it is enterèd;
Then let us now our sins down tread,
And joyfully all appear.
Let’s merry be this day,
And let us now both sport and play,
Hang grief, cast care away,
God send you a happy new year!

The name day now of Christ we keep,
Who for our sins did often weep;
His hands and feet were wounded deep,
And his blessèd side, with a spear.
His head they crowned with thorn,
And at him they did laugh and scorn,
Who for our good was born;
God send us a happy New Year!

And now with New-Year’s gifts each friend
Unto each other they do send;
God grant we may all our lives amend,
And that the truth may appear.
Now like the snake your skin cast off
Of evil thoughts and sin,
And so the year begin:
God send us a happy new year!

And here’s a little elementary musical lesson you can teach this week. Different people naturally have different vocal ranges, from high to low. Professional singers can extend those ranges through training, but it’s always the case that some people naturally sing at a higher pitch and some at a lower. The adult male vocal ranges, from highest to lowest, are commonly called countertenor (like Deller, above), tenor, baritone, and bass. The adult female ranges, from highest to lowest, are soprano, mezzo-soprano, and contralto. Although these terms are used most often in the context of classical music and opera, they can be applied to singers in popular music as well: country star Dolly Parton, for example, has a strong soprano voice, while the late Karen Carpenter was famous as a contralto. The male countertenor voice is one of the rarest, which is why Deller was so celebrated in his day.

The tune “Greensleeves” is one of the oldest and best-known English folk tunes, first attested in print in 1580. It’s so old and popular, in fact, that it was even mentioned by Shakespeare (in The Merry Wives of Windsor). A great variety of lyrics, both sacred and secular, have been written for it, and it’s been subject to a great many instrumental arrangements, both popular and classical. (“Greensleeves to a Ground” is an especially popular and beautiful Christmastime instrumental arrangement.)

What marvelous musical discoveries have you been making in your homeschool during this delightful Holiday Music Month? 🎄 🎵

❡ Musical memories: If you’d like to fill your homeschool with some beautiful background sounds during the holidays, why not tune in to the 24-hour Holiday Channel from WQXR, the famous classical music radio station in New York City. “Enjoy the sounds of orchestras, choirs, brass ensembles and more as we celebrate the sacred and secular sounds of the season.” I have it on as background music almost all day at this time of year. Won’t you join me? 📻

❡ Olden times and ancient rhymes: What did the Christmas season sound like a hundred years ago and more? Find out from this wonderful collection of historic recordings of American Christmas music, brought together by the Library of Congress. 🎄

❡ Lift every voice: This is one of our occasional posts on Homeschool Arts & Music. 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: “What so soon will wake and grow”

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January is a cold month of waiting. We who have been through many Januaries know that eventually the warm world will burst forth again; but what if January is all you’ve ever known? That’s the question asked by Philip Larkin in “First Sight,” our homeschool poem-of-the-week for this first week of the new year, offered for all things born in January.

First Sight

Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.

As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth’s immeasurable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.

Philip Larkin (1922–1985) was one of the best-known English poets of the twentieth century. Although he was not a prolific writer, the small volumes of prose and poetry that he published received wide acclaim and have been appreciated by readers for decades. Very few people, even in the top tier, ever make a living from writing poetry, and Larkin was no exception: he spent most of his career working as a professional librarian, principally at the University of Hull in the north of England.

Larkin was a poetical master craftsman. Although his poems use ordinary language, they are often quite tightly structured, as you can see in this week’s example. Have your students count syllables: I find exactly seven in most lines and eight in just two. Look next at the rhyme-scheme: snow–air–know–glare–fro–fold–cold. I make it out to be ABABACC. Note also that the seven lines in both stanzas are divided in exactly the same way: one sentence for the first four lines, and then a second sentence for the last three. And he uses the same word, snow, at the end of both the first line and the last line, tying the whole poem together like a package with a string around it.

Many of Larkin’s poems have a prose-y feel to them because he often employs enjambment — the carrying over of a sentence or idea past the end of the line. We saw another good example of that technique earlier this school year in the poetry of Elizabeth Jennings. (“Enjambment” is a beautiful ten-dollar literary word that your high-school homescholars can latch onto.)

As you walk through the winter landscape this January, invite your students to think about all the life hidden around them: frozen roots, dormant seeds, sleeping caterpillars, mice in their burrows — all of them waiting to wake and grow.

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

❡ Literary lives: The website of the Poetry Foundation includes biographical notes and examples of the work of many important poets (including Philip Larkin) that are suitable for high school students and homeschool teachers. 🖋

❡ What so soon will wake and grow: If a special line or turn of phrase happens to strike you in one of our weekly poems, just copy it onto your homeschool bulletin board for a few days and invite your students to speak it aloud — that’s all it takes to begin a new poetical friendship and learn a few lovely words that will stay with you for life. ❄️

❡ Here, said the year: This post is one of our regular homeschool poems-of-the-week. 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, and add your name to our River Houses mailing list to get posts like these delivered right to your mailbox every week. 🗞

🔭 WATCHERS OF THE SKIES – January 2022

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On the first Saturday of every month we post educational skywatching notes for the homeschool month ahead. Here’s the monthly northern hemisphere night-sky review for January 2022 from the Hubble Space Telescope’s website — it features Orion, our term-namesake, Auriga and Capella, this month’s Great Star, and Taurus and Aldebaran, last month’s Great Star:

And here’s another January night-sky review, courtesy of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California — it features January meteors and planets:

One of the easiest astronomical exercises you and your students can do each month is print out your own copy of the current two-page Evening Sky Map and monthly sky calendar available from skymaps.com:

Each map includes a constellation chart for the month as well as a schedule of upcoming astronomical events and an astronomical glossary. Give a copy to your students and ask them to study it and report back to you on three notable things you can watch for this month. (And as they report to you, ask them questions about what they’re telling you.) Do that for a few minutes each month, and before you know it you’ll have a skywatching expert in your homeschool.

The best stargazing nights in January will be toward the beginning of the month: the moon will be new (and the sky darkest) on the 2nd. As always, you can look up the moon’s phases in your River Houses almanac and also on the timeanddate.com website. 🌑🌓🌕🌗🌑

January is the middle month of Orion Term, our winter term in the River Houses. Our Great Star for the month of January (as noted above) is Capella (alpha Aurigae), the brightest star in the constellation Auriga the Charioteer, which we’ll be writing about next week. Print your own River Houses Star Calendar and follow along with us through the year as we learn about twelve of the high lights of the northern hemisphere night sky. 🌟

What celestial observations will you and your students be making in your homeschool this January? 😊

❡ All the star-sown sky: Teaching your students to recognize the constellations is one of the simplest and most enduring gifts you can give them. Our recommended backyard star guide and homeschool world atlas both contain charts of the constellations that will help you learn your way around the heavens. Find a dark-sky spot near you this month and spend some quality homeschool time with your students beneath the starry vault. ✨

❡ The starry archipelagoes: For a great weekly astronomical essay, perfect for older homeschoolers, pay a visit to “The Sky This Week” from the U.S. Naval Observatory. These well-written pages, posted each Tuesday, usually focus on one or two special astronomical events or phenomena. If you have high school science students, have them read these pages aloud to you each week, or ask them to study them and narrate a summary back to you. 🌌

❡ Worlds scoop their arcs: Where are the planets right now? Not as we see them in the sky, but rather where are they in their orbits around the sun? Find out at The Planets Today. 🪐

❡ Make friendship with the stars: 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. 🔭

🗓 🎉 ❄️ HAPPY HOMESCHOOL JANUARY from the River Houses!

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Happy January and Happy New Year to all our homeschool readers and friends! Here are some educational ideas, events, and activities to look for in the homeschool month ahead. 🔍

Third-century Roman calendar mosaic from Tunisia. (Image: Ad Meskens/Wikimedia Commons.)
January with 31 days is the middle month of Orion Term, our winter term in the River Houses. Orion Term runs from December through February. Visit our homeschool calendar page and print out some of our simple educational calendars and planners — they’ll help you create a light and easy structure for your homeschool year. 🗓

The month of January (Latin mensis Ianuarius), the “doorway month,” is named for Janus, the two-faced Roman god of doorways, passages, exits and entrances, endings and beginnings. Although January has long been taken as the beginning of the year, in the earliest history of the Roman calendar the months were counted beginning with March (the month of the spring equinox) rather than with January. You can learn more about different kinds of modern and historical calendars on pages 347–353 in your brand new 2022 River Houses almanac. 📚

January advice:

He that will live another year
Must eate a hen in Januvere.

Our Sunday states-of-the-week for January will be Louisiana, Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, and Alabama, and our countries will run from Guatemala to Kenya. Print your own River Houses States & Countries Calendar and tour the United States and the whole world with us from Delaware to Hawaii and Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. 🇺🇸 🌎

We’ll be visiting World Heritage Sites in Guatemala, Hungary, Iran, and Italy this month — our River Houses World Heritage Calendar will point the way. 🗺

We’ll have homeschool poems this month from Philip Larkin (for new births), Gail Mazur (for homeschool dads), James Weldon Johnson (for Martin Luther King Day), and John Masefield (for the Challenger Seven). Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and join us as we visit with fifty of our favorite friends over the course of the year. ✒️

Our Friday Bird Families this month will include the Storks, Frigatebirds, Boobies, Gannets, Cormorants, Darters, and Pelicans; the Herons, Bitterns, Ibises, and Spoonbills; the New World Vultures, Ospreys, Hawks, Kites, and Eagles; and the Owls. (So many wonderful names, yes?) Print your own copy of our River Houses Calendar of American Birds, get out your copy of our recommended homeschool bird guide, and follow the flyways with us. 🦅

Our monthly Great Star for January is Capella (alpha Aurigae), which we’ll be writing about next week. Print your own River Houses Star Calendar and join us as we visit twelve high lights of the northern hemisphere night sky and make them friends for life. 🌟

Our Dewey Decimal class for January is the Social 300s — follow along with us (on the first Tuesday of each month) and help your students learn the whole library over the course of the year! 📚

And watch for our monthly Wikimedia Commons Photo Challenge post, coming up in the next few days — it’s a great opportunity for homeschool photographers. 📸

Also coming up this month:

 ⬩ 1 January (Sa): New Year’s Day 🎉
 ⬩ 5 January (W): Twelfth Night 🍐🌳 🎭
 ⬩ 17 January (M): Martin Luther King Jr. Day 🇺🇸
 ⬩ 17 January (M): Lunar Society Report 🌕
 ⬩ 27 January (Th): Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Birthday, 1756 🎼

Finally, we’ll let Thomas Hood (1799–1845) toast us out of 2021 (please!) and into (a better, we hope) 2022:

And ye, who have met with Adversity’s blast,
 And been bow’d to the earth by its fury;
To whom the Twelve Months, that have recently passed,
 Were as harsh as a prejudiced jury —
Still, fill to the future! and join in our chime,
 The regrets of remembrance to cozen,
And having obtained a New Trial of Time,
 Shout in hopes of a kindlier dozen! — Hurrah!

What calendrical events and annual apparitions will you be marking in your homeschool this January? 😊

❡ Thirty days hath September: This is one of our regular Homeschool Terms & Calendars posts. Print your own set of River Houses Calendars to follow along with us, and add your name to our weekly mailing list to get more great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🗞