Happy April to all our homeschool readers and friends! Here are some wonderful educational opportunities and teaching traditions that you and your students can watch for in the homeschool month ahead. 🔍
The month of April (Latin mensis Aprilis) was the second month of the year in the earliest Roman calendars, which treated the beginning of spring in March as the beginning of the new year. The origin of the month’s name is disputed, and it may be lost forever in the mists of time. Some have connected it to the Latin verb aperire (to open), while others associate it with variant name-forms of the goddess Aphrodite, but there is no sure consensus. Just as the Romans renamed their original fifth month Julius (July, after Julius Caesar) and their original sixth month Augustus (August, after Augustus Caesar), so did they briefly rename April Neronius after the emperor Nero — but following Nero’s disastrous reign and subsequent suicide, that short-lived name change was reversed. You can learn more about different kinds of modern and historical calendars on pages 347–353 in your River Houses almanac. 📚
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.
Our Sunday states-of-the-week for April will be California, Minnesota, Oregon, Kansas, and West Virginia, and our countries will run from Myanmar to Poland. 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 Nepal, Nicaragua, Oman, and Pakistan this month — our River Houses World Heritage Calendar will point the way. 🗺
We’ll have homeschool poems this month from Geoffrey Chaucer (for April showers), Delmore Schwartz (for April days), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (for Paul Revere), Ralph Waldo Emerson (for the embattled farmers), and A.E. Housman (for the loveliest of trees). 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 the Chickadees, Titmice, Penduline Tits, Verdins, Long-tailed Tits, and Bushtits; the Nuthatches, Creepers, and Wrens; the Gnatcatchers, Dippers, and Kinglets; and the Sylviid Warblers, Leaf Warblers, Grasshopper-Warblers, and Old World Flycatchers and Chats. 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 April is Regulus (alpha Leonis), 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 April is the Technological 600s — 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 April (Sa): Annual Swiss Spaghetti Harvest 🍝
⬩ 6 April (Th): Lunar Society Report 🌕
⬩ 19 April (W): Lexington & Concord, 1775 🇺🇸
⬩ 23 April (Su): William Shakespeare’s Birthday (more or less), 1564 🎭
⬩ 28 April (F): National Arbor Day 🌳
And remember that while you’re sleeping, or awake, or indoors, or out, “spring advances up the United States at the average rate of about fifteen miles a day. It ascends mountainsides at the rate of about a hundred feet a day. It sweeps ahead like a flood of water, racing down the long valleys, creeping up hillsides in a rising tide. Most of us, like the man who lives on the bank of a river and watches the stream flow by, see only one phase of the movement of spring. Each year the season advances toward us out of the south, sweeps around us, goes flooding away to the north.” 🌸
What calendrical events and annual apparitions will you be marking in your homeschool this April? 😊
❡ 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. 🗞
❡ Support our work: If you enjoy the educational materials we distribute each week, please support our work and the noble cause of homeschooling by making a small donation as a Friend of the River Houses! Your support keeps us going and growing! 😊
