About the River Houses Homeschool Network

The River Houses project is a big and wonderful plan to create a new type of homeschool network made up of local chapters called Houses. This page outlines where we hope to go. To receive a great collection of homeschool teaching ideas every week and to follow our progress, please add your name to our weekly mailing list! Thank you! 😊

The River Houses (riverhouses.org) is a national association of local homeschool societies. We help homeschooling families make friends, form local groups, and give their children a great homeschool education.

Each local chapter within the River Houses organization is called a House — just like in the Harry Potter stories — and each House is made up of a group of local homeschooling families who come together for social support and educational enrichment throughout the year. The Houses are strength multipliers for local homeschooling families in each community.

Each of our Houses takes its name from a local river — Merrimack River House, perhaps, or Red River House, or Cedar Creek House, or Cuyahoga River House. The Houses are not building, they are groups of people — chapters of our national organization — and they are “light” by design: they offer many opportunities but impose few requirements, and they are open to all active homeschoolers within their local area.

Each House is led by three volunteer Deans — member parents who agree to serve as coordinators for House activities and to welcome new families into the House. Some members may simply wish to get to know a few homeschooling neighbors and attend a monthly outing in the park; others may wish to meet once a week to socialize and compare notes at the local public library (an excellent plan that we encourage); still others may wish to organize field trips or formal cooperative teaching opportunities. All levels of participation are welcome.

Like other community-oriented civic associations, the River Houses network is non-political and organizationally secular, and we welcome homeschool families from every background. We are not a curricular program: homeschoolers following any curriculum (or no curriculum) are all welcome to join the River Houses. Instead of a network of affinity groups — secular homeschoolers, religious homeschoolers, Classical homeschoolers, and so on — the River Houses is a network of proximity groups: homeschoolers of the Onion River valley (Onion River House), or of the Mulberry Creek region (Mulberry Creek House), or of the upper Minnesota basin (Whetstone River House). The River Houses makes it easier for homeschoolers to build upon the distinctive educational opportunities that are available in every community and to accumulate and share local knowledge for the benefit of all.

To provide some common experiences and to link our members together as a whole we distribute (by email, web, and social media) a rich assortment of informal educational materials on science, art, geography, history, literature, and more, all through the year. Members are free to use these materials or adapt them to their own local circumstances and interests as they see fit, all in keeping with the freedom of choice that every homeschooling family enjoys. We produce a handy set of homeschool calendars and planners, and we also have a set of six standard reference books that we recommend for your family library — not children’s books, but family books that can support your homeschool teaching in many different subject areas, year after year.

The emblem of the River Houses is the coat of arms shown here. From time immemorial, schools, colleges, and other civic associations have borne coats of arms that reflect their history and ideals, and our coat of arms represents — can you see it? — three houses beside a river running through golden fields. In the language of medieval heraldry the design would be described as Or, a chevron azure between three lozenges sable (On a gold field, a blue chevron between three black diamonds). The River Houses motto, from the ancient Roman poet Horace, is Hoc erat in votis, freely translated as “This was ever my wish.” Horace’s simple country wish was: “A handsome house to lodge a friend, / A river at my garden’s end.” (The ancient Roman poet has also given his name to our River Houses mascot, Horace the River Otter.)

The River Houses project is being developed by Dr. Robert J. (Bob) O’Hara, a resident of the Nashua River valley in Massachusetts. An award-winning science teacher and an academic biologist by training (Ph.D., Harvard University), Bob O’Hara has taught at Harvard, the University of North Carolina, and Middlebury College, and he has been internationally recognized for his work in residential education at the college and university level. Through the River Houses project he hopes to bring that expertise to the homeschooling community.

That’s where we hope to go. To keep up with our progress (and get a host of wonderful homeschool teaching tips every week) please subscribe to our free homeschool newsletter!

❡ Homeschool calendars: We have a whole collection of free, printable, educational homeschool calendars and planners available on our main River Houses calendar page. They will help you create a light and easy structure for your homeschool year. Give them a try today! 🗓️

❡ Support our work: If you enjoy our educational materials, please support us by starting your regular Amazon shopping from our very own homeschool teaching supplies page. When you click through from our page, any purchase you make earns us a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you for helping us to keep going and growing! 🛒