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 Arizona, and our COUNTRIES are Uzbekistan 🇺🇿, Vanuatu 🇻🇺, Vatican City 🇻🇦, and Venezuela 🇻🇪. (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 331–346 in your almanac. Browse through our many homeschool astronomy posts for even more.
🗓 TODAY, Sunday (31 July 2022) — Today is the 212th day of 2022; there are 153 days remaining in this common year. Learn more about different modern and historical calendars on pages 347–353 in your River Houses almanac. 📚 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. 🚀 🌕
Monday (1 August 2022) — 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. 🍻
Tuesday (2 August 2022) — The first United States census, conducted under Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution, commenced on this day in 1790. The total count was 3,929,214. 🇺🇸 The first Lincoln Cents were released into circulation on this day in 1909, the centennial year of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. 💰 This is the first Tuesday of August, and our regular first-Tuesday tour of the Dewey Decimal classification, from 000 to 999, is now complete! This month, as a final adventure for the current homeschool year, we’re going to go On Beyond Dewey and see what lies there. 🔭
Wednesday (3 August 2022) — The famous opera house “La Scala” opened on this day in 1778 in Milan, Italy. 🎵 Today is also the birthday of the Pulitzer Prize–winning World War II journalist Ernie Pyle (1900–1945). 📰 And our Wednesday tour of World Heritage Sites this week will take you Coro and its Port in Venezuela. 🇻🇪
Thursday (4 August 2022) — The great English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on this day in 1792. 🖋 It’s also the birthday of the great American trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong (1901–1971). 🎺
Friday (5 August 2022) — Today is an important day in the history of American press freedom. On this day in 1735, a jury found John Peter Zenger and his newspaper, the New York Weekly Journal, not guilty of seditious libel against the governor of New York on the grounds that what they had published was true. 📰 Today is also the birthday of American astronaut Neil Armstrong (1930–2012), the first man to walk on the moon. 🚀 🌕 👨🚀 Our Friday Bird Families post this week, the last one for the 2021–2022 homeschool year, will introduce you to an assortment of accidental and extinct North American birds that are featured at the end of your recommended bird guide. Visit our River Houses calendar page and print out a new Calendar of American Birds to follow for the new homeschool year coming up next month. 🦅
Saturday (6 August 2022) — Today is the birthday of the great Victorian poet Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892). 🖋 It’s also the birthday of the legendary American comedian Lucille Ball (1911–1989). 📺 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 (7 August 2022) — General Nathanael Greene, “the Fighting Quaker,” George Washington’s right-hand man and one of the great military strategists of the Revolution, was born on this day in 1742 in Warwick, Rhode Island. Wherever you live in the United States, from Mississippi to Maine, there’s a good chance there’s something named after General Greene near you. ⚔️ And speaking of George Washington, on this day in 1782 he established the first American military decoration, the Badge of Military Merit, for soldiers wounded during the American Revolution. The award is today called the Purple Heart and it bears Washington’s profile. 🎖 Today is also the birthday of famed paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey (1903–1972). 💀 And our Sunday States & Countries for next week will be Alaska 🇺🇸, Vietnam 🇻🇳, Yemen 🇾🇪, Zambia 🇿🇲, and Zimbabwe 🇿🇼.
🍻 ⚓️ 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 in your homeschool this week? 🥂
🌎 🇻🇪 EVERYTHING FLOWS: Venezuela on the northeast coast of South America is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is northern Venezuela’s Manzanares River, which flows into the Caribbean near the city of Cumaná. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Manzanares 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 693–695), 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. 🗓
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