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🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 31 July 2022

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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 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.

The Manzanares River near Cumaná, Venezuela. (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 (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. 🗓

❡ Become a Friend! If you enjoy the educational materials we distribute each week, please support our work and the noble cause of homeschooling by becoming a Friend of the River Houses! Your support keeps us going and growing. Thank you! 😊

🌎 🇺🇸 SUNDAY STATES: Arizona, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, and More

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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. 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 418), so this week’s state is:

  • 🇺🇸
    Arizona State Seal
    ARIZONA (the 48th state, 14 February 1912) — The Grand Canyon State. Capital: Phoenix. Arizona can be found on page 564 in your almanac and on plates 38 and 142 in your atlas (10th and 11th eds.). Name origin: “Spanish version of Pima Indian word for ‘little spring place’ or Aztec arizuma, meaning ‘silver-bearing’” (almanac page 419). State bird: Cactus Wren (bird guide page 390). Website: az.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:

  • 🇺🇿 UZBEKISTAN in central Asia. Population: 30,842,796. Capital: Tashkent. Government: Authoritarian presidential republic. Website: www.gov.uz (in Uzbek, English, and several other languages).
  • 🇻🇺 VANUATU in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. Population: 303,009. Capital: Port-Vila. Government: Parliamentary republic. Website: parliament.gov.vu (in English).
  • 🇻🇦 VATICAN CITY, an enclave within the city of Rome, Italy; the seat of the Roman Catholic Church. Population: 1,000. Government: “Ecclesiastical elective monarchy; self-described as ‘absolute monarchy.’” Website: www.vatican.va (in Italian, English, and several other languages).
  • 🇻🇪 VENEZUELA in northeastern South America. Population: 29,069,153. Capital: Caracas. Government: Federal presidential republic. Website: presidencia.gob.ve (in Spanish).

These all appear in your current almanac, atlas, and history encyclopedia as well. The almanac, for example, has profiles of the nations of the world on pages 745–852; the endpapers of the atlas are index maps that will show you where each of the individual national and regional maps can be found; the history encyclopedia includes individual national histories on pages 489–599; and you can find additional illustrations, flags, and other mentions through the indexes in each of these volumes.

What grand global geographical excursions (real or virtual) have you been making in your homeschool this Hercules Term? 😊

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

❡ Come, here’s the map: Teaching your students to be fluent with high-quality maps — not just basically competent, but fluent — is one of the best educational gifts you can give them. Why not look up any one of our selected states or countries each week in your recommended homeschool atlas and show your students how to locate rivers, lakes, marshes, water depths, mountains and their elevations, highway numbers, airports, oil fields, railroads, ruins, battle sites, small towns, big cities, regional capitals, national capitals, parks, deserts, glaciers, borders, grid references, lines of longitude and latitude, and much more. There is so much information packed into professional maps of this kind that a magnifying glass is always helpful, even for young folks with good eyesight. The endpapers of the atlas and the technical map-reading information on Plate 2 (10th and 11th eds.) will guide you in your voyages of discovery. 🗺

❡ Plan an imaginary vacation: Here’s a fun exercise for your students: take one of the countries that we list each week and write out a family travel plan. How would you get there? How much will it cost? Will you need a passport? Where will you stay? Will you have to exchange your currency? How do you say hello the local language? What cities and attractions and landmarks will you visit? What foods will you eat? How will you get around (car, train, boat, mule)? Make a simple worksheet with blank spaces for the answers, have your students do the research, and start planning your world tour. ✈️ 🚞 🚗 🛳 🐎 😊

❡ The great globe itself: This is one of our regular Sunday States & Countries posts. Print your own River Houses States & Countries Calendar and follow along with us as we take an educational tour of the United States and the whole world over the course of the homeschool year. And don’t forget to add your name to our free mailing list to get more great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox every week. 🇺🇸 🌎

❡ Become a Friend! If you enjoy the educational materials we distribute each week, please support our work and the noble cause of homeschooling by becoming a Friend of the River Houses! Your support keeps us going and growing. Thank you! 😊

🦅 FRIDAY BIRD FAMILIES: Blackbirds, Meadowlarks, Orioles, and Allies

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Every Friday we invite you and your homeschool students to learn about a different group of North American birds in your recommended bird guide. It’s a great way to add a few minutes of informal science, geography, natural history, and imagination to your homeschool schedule throughout the year.

This week’s birds are the Blackbirds (pages 530–545), a group that includes a great variety of species, including the Grackles, Meadowlarks, Cowbirds, Orioles, and more.

If you’re teaching younger children, the way to use these posts is just to treat your bird guide as a picture book and spend a few minutes each week looking at all the interesting birds they may see one day. With that, your little lesson is done.

If you have older students, one of your objectives should be to help them become fluent with a technical reference book that’s packed with information, the kind of book they will encounter in many different fields of study. Here’s how your bird guide introduces this week’s birds:

BLACKBIRDS — Family Icteridae. Strong, direct flight and pointed bills mark this diverse group, which includes the meadowlarks, blackbirds, grackles, cowbirds, and orioles, among others. Species: 104 World, 25 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 Blackbird family, for example. How many species? (104 worldwide.) Are there any near us? (25 species in North America, and the individual maps will give us more detail.) What are their distinctive features? (Strong direct flight, conical bills, most species exhibit combinations of black, red, yellow, and orange, and so on.)

Pick a representative species or two to look at in detail each week and read the entry aloud, or have your students study it and then narrate it back to you, explaining all the information it contains. This week, why not investigate the Red-winged Blackbird (page 532), a common and familiar bird of marshes, ponds, lakes, and rivers all across North America.

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 Red-winged Blackbird? (8¾ inches long.) What is its scientific name? (Agelaius phoeniceus.) Will you be able to find this species where you live? At what times of year and in what habitat? (Study the range map and range description carefully to answer those questions, and see the book’s back flap for a map key.) Do the males and females look alike? The adults and juveniles? What song or call does this species make? How can you distinguish it from similar species? (The text and illustrations should answer all these questions.)

Red-winged Blackbirds can be found in most wetland habitats from the Atlantic to the Pacific. They are sexually dimorphic (two-formed): the males are the ones that are black with red “shoulders” (technically, the secondary coverts), while the females are brown and striped, usually with just a hint of red. Red-wings are highly territorial in the breeding season and aggressively defend the patch of marsh that contains their nest, but in the non-breeding season they commonly travel in large flocks, often mixed together with other blackbird species.

For two more species in the Blackbird family this week, take a look at the Eastern Meadowlark and the Western Meadowlark (page 530), a pair of sibling species — species that are so similar we humans often have trouble telling them apart.

Meadowlarks, both Eastern and Western, are common birds of grasslands and farm fields. They like to perch on fence posts, tree stumps, and wires, and they sing a loud warbling whistle all through the day. And unlike the Red-winged Blackbirds, the Meadowlarks are sexually monomorphic (one-formed): the males and females look alike.

You can do little ten-minute lessons of this kind with any of the species in your bird guide that catch your interest. Pick one that is near you, or that looks striking, or that has a strange name, and explore. For example, why not take a look at the Baltimore Oriole (page 544), a bird so popular they named a baseball team after it!

In all these Friday Bird Families posts, our aim is not to present a specific set of facts to memorize. We hope instead to provide examples and starting points that you and your students can branch away from in many different directions. We also hope to show how you can help your students develop the kind of careful skills in reading, observation, and interpretation that they will need in all their future academic work.

What ornithological observations and naturalistical notes have you been making in your homeschool this Hercules Term? 😊

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

❡ 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: This week’s family includes two popular state birds: the Baltimore Oriole (Maryland) and the Western Meadowlark (Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon, and Wyoming). 🇺🇸

❡ 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. 🐦 🦉 🦆 🦃 🦅

❡ Become a Friend! If you enjoy the educational materials we distribute each week, please support our work and the noble cause of homeschooling by becoming a Friend of the River Houses! Your support keeps us going and growing. Thank you! 😊

🌎 🇺🇸 WEEKLY WORLD HERITAGE: Carlsbad Caverns in the United States

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The United States is one of our homeschool countries-of-the-week, so why not spend a few minutes today learning about one of the United States’ World Heritage Sites: Carlsbad Caverns National Park.

“The Chinese Theater” section of “The Big Room” in Carlsbad Cavern, New Mexico. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

Carlsbad Caverns National Park is home to one of the best known and most extensively studied limestone cave systems in the world:

The more than 120 limestone caves within Carlsbad Caverns National Park are outstanding and notable world-wide because of their size, mode of origin, and the abundance, diversity and beauty of the speleothems (decorative rock formations) within. On-going geologic processes continue to form rare and unique speleothems, particularly in Lechuguilla Cave. Carlsbad Caverns and Lechuguilla Cave are well known for their great natural beauty, exceptional geologic features, and unique reef and rock formations. The Permian-aged Capitan Reef complex (in which Carlsbad Caverns, Lechuguilla and other caves formed) is one of the best preserved and most accessible complexes available for scientific study in the world. (World Heritage Centre #721)

You can find a gallery of additional photos of Carlsbad Caverns National Park on the World Heritage Centre’s website.

“The Big Room” as captured in 1942 by the great photographer Ansel Adams. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

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 are you exploring in your homeschool this Hercules Term? 😊

❡ Books in the running brooks: You can always turn to your River Houses almanac, atlas, and history encyclopedia for more information about any of our countries-of-the-week. The almanac has profiles of all the nations of the world on pages 752–859; the endpapers of the atlas are indexes that will show you where all of the individual national and regional maps may be found; the history encyclopedia includes national histories on pages 489–599; and you can find additional illustrations, flags, and other mentions through the indexes in each of these volumes. For an ideal little lesson, just write the name of the Weekly World Heritage Site on your homeschool bulletin board, find its location in your atlas, read the WHC’s brief description aloud, look at a picture or two, and you’re done. Over the course of the year, without even realizing it, your students will absorb a wealth of new historical, geographical, and cultural information. 🇺🇸

❡ The great globe itself: This is one of our regular Homeschool States & Countries posts featuring historical and natural sites of international importance. Download a copy of our River Houses World Heritage Calendar and follow along with us as we tour the planet, and add your name to our weekly mailing list to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🌎 🌍 🌏

❡ Become a Friend! If you enjoy the educational materials we distribute each week, please support our work and the noble cause of homeschooling by becoming a Friend of the River Houses! Your support keeps us going and growing. Thank you! 😊

🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 24 July 2022

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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.

🕯️ IT’S NATIONAL MOTH WEEK! (Be sure to get your free moth coloring book!)

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is New Mexico, and our COUNTRIES are United Arab Emirates 🇦🇪, United Kingdom 🇬🇧, United States 🇺🇸, and Uruguay 🇺🇾. (Our separate Sunday States & Countries post for the week went up just a few minutes ago.)

🌘 THE MOON at the beginning of this week is a waning 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 (24 July 2022) — Today is the 205th day of 2022; there are 160 days remaining in this common year. Learn more about different modern and historical calendars on pages 347–353 in your River Houses almanac. 📚 Today is the birthday of “The Liberator,” Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), one of the most important figures in the history of Latin America. Bolívar played a central role in establishing the independence of Bolivia (which was named for him), Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, and Venezuela. 🇧🇴 On this day in 1847, a group of Mormon pioneers under the leadership of Brigham Young arrived in the Salt Lake Valley and established the settlement that became Salt Lake City, Utah. 🏞 And on this day in 1969, the Apollo 11 capsule carrying astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins successfully splashed down in the Pacific Ocean about 800 miles southwest of Hawaii. 👨‍🚀👨‍🚀👨‍🚀 🌕 🚀 🌏 👨‍🚀👨‍🚀👨‍🚀

Monday (25 July 2022) — Today is the birthday of the German medical researcher Paul Langerhans (1847–1888) who discovered the insulin-secreting cell clusters of the pancreas, known today as the islets of Langerhans. 🔬

Tuesday (26 July 2022) — The great painter of the American West, George Catlin, was born on this day in 1796. 🎨 The most well known of the many attempts to create a universal language for all mankind got underway on this day in 1887 with the publication of Unua Libro, the First Book setting forth the proposed international language of Esperanto. 🗣

Wednesday (27 July 2022) — The inimitable Bugs Bunny made his screen debut on this day in 1940 in a short animated film called A Wild Hare. Elmer Fudd couldn’t catch him then, and hasn’t to this day. 🐰 Our Wednesday tour of World Heritage Sites this week will take you to Carlsbad Caverns National Park in the United States. 🇺🇸

Thursday (28 July 2022) — Today is the birthday of the great English polymath Robert Hooke (1635–1703), one of the pioneers of microscopy and the first person to apply the world “cell” to the basic structural unit of living things. 🔬 And one of the most innovative poets of the nineteenth century, Gerard Manley Hopkins, was born on this day in 1844. 🖋

Friday (29 July 2022) — The seven-mile-long Cape Cod Canal first opened on this day in 1914, significantly reducing sailing time between Boston and New York (and markedly increasing safety). 🚢 Our Friday Bird Families post this week will introduce you to the Blackbirds and their allies. Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦅

Saturday (30 July 2022) — Today is the birthday of the great (and largely homeschooled) English writer Emily Bronte (1818–1848), author of Wuthering Heights. 🖋 It’s also the birthday of the American engineer and industrialist Henry Ford (1863–1947). 🚗

Sunday (31 July 2022) — 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. 🚀 🌕 And our Sunday States & Countries for next week will be Arizona 🇺🇸, Uzbekistan 🇺🇿, Vanuatu 🇻🇺, Vatican City 🇻🇦, and Venezuela 🇻🇪.

🥂 OUR WEEKLY TOAST is an old traditional wish for the necessities of life: “Health of body, peace of mind, a clean shirt, and a dollar.”

❡ 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 are taken 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 in your homeschool this week? 🥂

🌍 🇬🇧 EVERYTHING FLOWS: The United Kingdom in western Europe is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the historic River Wye, which forms part of the border between England and Wales. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the River Wye entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

The River Wye near the Welsh village of Hay-on-Wye. “All the water in Wye cannot wash your Majesty’s Welsh blood for your body, I can tell you that,” says Shakespeare’s Captain Fluellen in Henry V. (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 (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. 🗓

❡ Become a Friend! If you enjoy the educational materials we distribute each week, please support our work and the noble cause of homeschooling by becoming a Friend of the River Houses! Your support keeps us going and growing. Thank you! 😊

🌎 🇺🇸 SUNDAY STATES: New Mexico, the UAE, Uruguay, and More

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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. 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 418), so this week’s state is:

  • 🇺🇸
    New Mexico State Seal
    NEW MEXICO (the 47th state, 6 January 1912) — The Land of Enchantment. Capital: Santa Fe. New Mexico can be found on page 579 in your almanac and on plates 38 and 142 in your atlas (10th and 11th eds.). Name origin: “Spaniards in Mexico applied term to land north and west of Rio Grande in the 16th century” (almanac page 419). State bird: Roadrunner (bird guide page 80). Website: www.nm.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:

  • 🇦🇪 THE UNITED ARAB EMIRATES in the Middle East. Population: 9,856,612. Capital: Abu Dhabi. Government: Federation of monarchies. Website: www.government.ae (in Arabic and English).
  • 🇬🇧 THE UNITED KINGDOM in western Europe. Population: 66,052,076. Capital: London. Government: Parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Website: www.gov.uk (in English).
  • 🇺🇸 THE UNITED STATES in North America. Population: 334,996,398. Capital: Washington, D.C. Government: Constitutional federal republic. Website: www.usa.gov (in English).
  • 🇺🇾 URUGUAY in southern South America. Population: 3,398,239. Capital: Montevideo. Government: Presidential republic. Website: www.gub.uy (in Spanish).

These all appear in your current almanac, atlas, and history encyclopedia as well. The almanac, for example, has profiles of the nations of the world on pages 745–852; the endpapers of the atlas are index maps that will show you where each of the individual national and regional maps can be found; the history encyclopedia includes individual national histories on pages 489–599; and you can find additional illustrations, flags, and other mentions through the indexes in each of these volumes.

What grand global geographical excursions (real or virtual) have you been making in your homeschool this Hercules Term? 😊

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

❡ Come, here’s the map: Teaching your students to be fluent with high-quality maps — not just basically competent, but fluent — is one of the best educational gifts you can give them. Why not look up any one of our selected states or countries each week in your recommended homeschool atlas and show your students how to locate rivers, lakes, marshes, water depths, mountains and their elevations, highway numbers, airports, oil fields, railroads, ruins, battle sites, small towns, big cities, regional capitals, national capitals, parks, deserts, glaciers, borders, grid references, lines of longitude and latitude, and much more. There is so much information packed into professional maps of this kind that a magnifying glass is always helpful, even for young folks with good eyesight. The endpapers of the atlas and the technical map-reading information on Plate 2 (10th and 11th eds.) will guide you in your voyages of discovery. 🗺

❡ Plan an imaginary vacation: Here’s a fun exercise for your students: take one of the countries that we list each week and write out a family travel plan. How would you get there? How much will it cost? Will you need a passport? Where will you stay? Will you have to exchange your currency? How do you say hello the local language? What cities and attractions and landmarks will you visit? What foods will you eat? How will you get around (car, train, boat, mule)? Make a simple worksheet with blank spaces for the answers, have your students do the research, and start planning your world tour. ✈️ 🚞 🚗 🛳 🐎 😊

❡ The great globe itself: This is one of our regular Sunday States & Countries posts. Print your own River Houses States & Countries Calendar and follow along with us as we take an educational tour of the United States and the whole world over the course of the homeschool year. And don’t forget to add your name to our free mailing list to get more great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox every week. 🇺🇸 🌎

❡ Become a Friend! If you enjoy the educational materials we distribute each week, please support our work and the noble cause of homeschooling by becoming a Friend of the River Houses! Your support keeps us going and growing. Thank you! 😊

🖋 🔔 WONDERFUL WORDS: As Kingfishers Catch Fire

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

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

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But a man who is just does even more than these lesser beings:
He acts out justice in his life (Hopkins makes “justice” into a verb);
He enacts Christ’s grace in his life, and that is how God sees him;
Christ’s image is reflected (“plays”) in everything he does,
And what he does is beautiful to God,
Just as a child’s face is forever beautiful to its father.

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

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

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

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

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

❡ Here, said the year: This post is one of our regular homeschool poems-of-the-week. 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. 🗞

❡ Become a Friend! If you enjoy the educational materials we distribute each week, please support our work by becoming a Friend of the River Houses today. Thank you! 😊

🦅 FRIDAY BIRD FAMILIES: Cardinals, Grosbeaks, and Allies

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Every Friday we invite you and your homeschool students to learn about a different group of North American birds in your recommended bird guide. It’s a great way to add a few minutes of informal science, geography, natural history, and imagination to your homeschool schedule throughout the year.

This week’s birds are the brilliant Cardinals and their allies (pages 518–529), including the American Tanagers, Grosbeaks, and Buntings.

If you’re teaching younger children, the way to use these posts is just to treat your bird guide as a picture book and spend a few minutes each week looking at all the interesting birds they may see one day. With that, your little lesson is done.

If you have older students, one of your objectives should be to help them become fluent with a technical reference book that’s packed with information, the kind of book they will encounter in many different fields of study. Here’s how your bird guide introduces this week’s birds:

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

When you’re training your young naturalists, teach them to ask and answer from their bird guide some of the first questions any naturalist would ask about a new group — about the Cardinal family, for example. How many species? (48 worldwide.) Are there any near us? (18 in North America, and the individual maps will give us more detail.) What are their distinctive features? (A diverse group, mainly seedeaters, many are brightly colored, and so on.)

Pick a representative species or two to look at in detail each week and read the entry aloud, or have your students study it and then narrate it back to you, explaining all the information it contains. This week, why not investigate the Northern Cardinal (page 522), one of the best-loved birds in the United States.

All sorts of biological information is packed into the brief species descriptions in your bird guide — can your students tease it out? How big is the Northern Cardinal? (8¾ inches long.) What is its scientific name? (Cardinalis cardinalis.) Will you be able to find this species where you live? At what times of year and in what habitat? (Study the range map and range description carefully to answer those questions, and see the book’s back flap for a map key.) Do the males and females look alike? The adults and juveniles? What song or call does this species make? How can you distinguish it from similar species? (The text and illustrations should answer all these questions.)

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

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

You can do little ten-minute lessons of this kind with any of the species in your bird guide that catch your interest. Pick one that is near you, or that looks striking, or that has a strange name, and explore. For a third species this week, why not take a look at the spectacular Painted Bunting (page 526), a southern species so brightly patterned that it almost looks artificial.

In all these Friday Bird Families posts, our aim is not to present a specific set of facts to memorize. We hope instead to provide examples and starting points that you and your students can branch away from in many different directions. We also hope to show how you can help your students develop the kind of careful skills in reading, observation, and interpretation that they will need in all their future academic work.

What ornithological observations and naturalistical notes have you been making in your homeschool this Hercules Term? 😊

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

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

❡ Nature notes: This is one of our regular Friday Bird Families posts for homeschool naturalists. Print your own copy of our River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow along with us! You can also add your name to our free weekly mailing list to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🐦 🦉 🦆 🦃 🦅

❡ Become a Friend! If you enjoy the educational materials we distribute each week, please support our work by becoming a Friend of the River Houses today. Thank you! 😊

🌍 🇺🇬 WEEKLY WORLD HERITAGE: The Buganda Tombs in Uganda

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Uganda in eastern Africa is one of our homeschool countries-of-the-week, so why not spend a few minutes today learning about one of Uganda’s World Heritage Sites: the Tombs of the Buganda Kings at Kasubi.

The Kasubi Tombs in Uganda. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

The Tombs of the Buganda Kings is the traditional burial site of the rulers of the Ganda people of eastern Africa:

The Tombs of Buganda Kings constitute a site embracing 26.8 hectares of Kasubi hillside within Kampala City. The site is the major spiritual centre for the Baganda where traditional and cultural practices have been preserved. The Kasubi Tombs are the most active religious place in the kingdom, where rituals are frequently performed. Its place as the burial ground for the previous four kings (Kabakas) qualifies it as a religious centre for the royal family, a place where the Kabaka and his representatives carry out important rituals related to Buganda culture. The site represents a place where communication links with the spiritual world are maintained.

Its spatial organization, starting from the border of the site marked with the traditional bark cloth trees, leading through the gatehouse, the main courtyard, and culminating in the large thatched building, housing the tombs of the four Kabakas, represents the best existing example of a Baganda palace/burial site.

At its core on the hilltop is the main tomb building, locally referred to as the “Muzibu-Azaala-Mpanga,” which is a masterpiece of this ensemble. A tomb building has been in existence since the 13th century. The latest building was the former palace of the Kabakas of Baganda, built in 1882 and converted into the royal burial ground in 1884. Four royal tombs now lie within the Muzibu-Azaala-Mpanga.

The main tomb building, which is circular and surmounted by a dome, is a major example of an architectural achievement that was raised with use of vegetal materials comprised of wooden poles, spear grass, reeds and wattle. Its unusual scale and outstanding details bear witness to the creative genius of the Baganda and as a masterpiece of form and craftsmanship, it is an exceptional surviving example of an architectural style developed by the powerful Buganda Kingdom since the 13th century.

The built and natural elements of the Kasubi Tombs site are charged with historical, traditional, and spiritual values. The site is a major spiritual centre for the Baganda and is the most active religious place in the kingdom. The structures and the traditional practices that are associated with the site are one of the exceptional representations of the African culture that depict a continuity of a living tradition. The site’s main significance lies in its intangible values of beliefs, spirituality, continuity and identity of the Baganda people. The site serves as an important historical and cultural symbol for Uganda and East Africa as a whole. (World Heritage Centre #1022)

You can find a gallery of additional photos of the Tombs of the Buganda Kings 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 are you exploring in your homeschool this Hercules Term? 😊

❡ Books in the running brooks: You can always turn to your River Houses almanac, atlas, and history encyclopedia for more information about any of our countries-of-the-week. The almanac has profiles of all the nations of the world on pages 752–859; the endpapers of the atlas are indexes that will show you where all of the individual national and regional maps may be found; the history encyclopedia includes national histories on pages 489–599; and you can find additional illustrations, flags, and other mentions through the indexes in each of these volumes. For an ideal little lesson, just write the name of the Weekly World Heritage Site on your homeschool bulletin board, find its location in your atlas, read the WHC’s brief description aloud, look at a picture or two, and you’re done. Over the course of the year, without even realizing it, your students will absorb a wealth of new historical, geographical, and cultural information. 🇺🇬

❡ The great globe itself: This is one of our regular Homeschool States & Countries posts featuring historical and natural sites of international importance. Download a copy of our River Houses World Heritage Calendar and follow along with us as we tour the planet, and add your name to our weekly mailing list to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🌎 🌍 🌏

🚀 🌕 APOLLO 11 MOON LANDING Resources for Your Homeschool

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This Wednesday (July 20th) is the 53rd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, a momentous event in human history that every homeschooler should know about. Here’s a roundup of some great Apollo resources you can share this week with your students.

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

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

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

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

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

Your students can also watch the complete 20-minute video of the descent sequence from lunar orbit to the moon’s surface. For anyone who is technically inclined, this footage is quite gripping. Many people don’t remember that the lander had only about 30 seconds of fuel left when it finally touched down because several last-minute course corrections had to be made. The video finishes with one of the most famous lines ever spoken: “Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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