![[The River Houses]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/arms-icon-100x100.png "The River Houses"){kind=icon}
Happy Independence Day! Why not celebrate the occasion with a reading of the Declaration of Independence — it’s been a homeschooling tradition since 1776.
🗓 Homeschool Holidays & History: Little Lessons for the Whole Year
Great homeschool teaching tips and wonderful little lessons on history, holidays, anniversaries, and notable events from the River Houses Homeschool Network. Use these regular posts to enrich your homeschool history curriculum all through the year. Print your own homeschool calendars and planners on our main River Houses calendar page, and subscribe to our free homeschool newsletter to get posts like these delivered right to your mailbox every week. 📫
📜 🇺🇸 HOMESCHOOL HISTORY: Independence Day and the Declaration
Be sure to add a visit to the National Archives and the Declaration of Independence itself (in person or online) to your homeschool Fourth of July calendar!
🖋 🇺🇸 WONDERFUL WORDS: William Emerson on “A Nation’s Strength”
![[Constitution Stamp 1987]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/we-the-people-stamp-1987-150x82.jpg)
“Not gold but only men can make / A people great and strong.” (Our patriotic homeschool poem-of-the-week, from William Ralph Emerson, for Independence Day.)
🇺🇸 🥂 HOMESCHOOL TOASTING TRADITIONS the Whole Year Round
Why not begin the delightful tradition of offering a toast around your family table each week. This classic Independence Day toast is a perfect way to get started.
🌠 JOIN A HOMESCHOOL SCIENCE PROJECT for International Asteroid Day!
You and your students can help astronomers study the shapes and orbits of real asteroids in space, right from the comfort of your little home academy. How cool is that?
🔭 ☄️ HOMESCHOOL ASTRONOMY: The Most Beautiful Objects in the Universe
Happy birthday to the great French astronomer Charles Messier (1730–1817), who cataloged some of the most beautiful nebulae, star clusters, and galaxies in the universe — so he could ignore them.
🌳 🗺️ LOCAL & FAMILY HISTORY PROJECTS for Homeschoolers
![[Tree]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/tree-emoji-150x150.png)
Local history and geography, and family history (genealogy), are ideal educational subjects to explore in every homeschool, especially during the summer months.
🖋 🏰 HAPPY FATHER’S DAY from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“A whisper, and then a silence: / Yet I know by their merry eyes / They are plotting and planning together / To take me by surprise.” (Our paternal homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, for Father’s Day, the third Sunday in June.)
🇺🇸 HOMESCHOOL HOLIDAYS: Happy Flag Day!
Flag Day (June 14th every year) celebrates the date in 1777 when Congress adopted the Stars & Stripes as the national flag of the new United States.
🪙 FREE HOMESCHOOL TEACHING MATERIALS from the U.S. Mint!
![[U.S. Mint]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/mint-logo-150x150.png){kind=logo}
The U.S. Mint has a wide variety of free printable educational materials that you can easily drop into your homeschooling schedule this summer. Why not look them over and expand your students’ numismatical horizons.
🖋 🇺🇸 WONDERFUL WORDS (and Music!): “O! say can you see?”
“Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam, / In full glory reflected now shines on the stream — / ‘Tis the star-spangled banner, O! long may it wave / O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.” (Our American homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Francis Scott Key, for Flag Day, the 14th of June.)
🇫🇷 HOMESCHOOL HISTORY: Learning About D-Day 1944
Learn about the World War II Allied invasion of Normandy, France, on 6 June 1944, using live news broadcasts from that day.
📺 HISTORICAL DOCUMENTARIES for Your Homeschool Summer
Twelve multi-part masterpieces of the documentarian’s art that you and your homeschool students can watch together and discuss over the summer. (Or at any other time of year!)
🖋 🎂 WONDERFUL WORDS: Happy Birthday to Walt Whitman
“Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich, / Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love, / A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother, / Chair’d in the adamant of Time.” (Happy birthday to the great Poet of America, Walt Whitman, born on this day in 1819.)
🎓 🎉 HOMESCHOOL MUSIC & HISTORY: Let Us Rejoice!
Invite your homeschoolers to learn a few lines this week from the most famous of all medieval student songs – it’s an educational inheritance they can carry with them all around the world.
🇺🇸 “AFTER A HUNDRED YEARS / Nobody knows the Place”
“Weeds triumphant ranged / Strangers strolled and spelled / At the lone Orthography / Of the Elder Dead.” (A special peaceful homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Emily Dickinson, for Memorial Day.)
🎂 HOMESCHOOL HOLIDAYS: Happy Birthday, Ralph! (Emerson, that is)
Invite your homeschool students to discover the work of the great American essayist, poet, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, born this day in 1803. Emerson is wonderful summer reading for homeschoolers.
🇺🇸 🕊 HOMESCHOOL HISTORY: Memorial Day
![[US Flag Stamp 2019]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/us-flag-stamp-2019-150x132.jpg)
“Rest, comrades, rest and sleep! / The thoughts of men shall be / As sentinels to keep / Your rest from danger free.” (Little homeschool lessons in literature, history, geography, and music, for the Memorial Day weekend.)
🖋 🎓 GRADUATION SEASON: “Set me free to find my calling”
“Bind me not to the pasture, chain me not to the plow, / Set me free to find my calling and I’ll return to you somehow.” (Our promising late May poem-of-the-week, from Marta Keen, for homeschool graduation season and the coming summer.)
📏 ⏱ 🌡 HAPPY WORLD METROLOGY DAY!
On this day in 1875, the meter was adopted as an international standard of measurement. That makes today World Metrology Day! Why not invite your students to take a few scientific measurements in your homeschool this week.
🇨🇦 HOMESCHOOL MUSIC & HISTORY: “To find the hand of Franklin”
To understand a complex and beautiful piece of art or music, your students must first learn a great deal about the world — names, places, people, and events that may seem at first to be unrelated.
🚀 HOMESCHOOL ASTRONOMY: Skylab, America’s First Space Station
Do you have a future astronaut in your homeschool? Then why not take a few minutes this week to learn about Skylab, America’s first space station, launched on this day in 1973.
🚂 AMERICAN ICON: The Golden Spike of 1869
Teach a little homeschool history lesson today on the anniversary of the completion of the North American transcontinental railroad in 1869.
🖋 🪺 WONDERFUL WORDS: Anne Bradstreet for Mother’s Day
“Great was my pain when I you bred, / Great was my care when I you fed. / Long did I keep you soft and warm / And with my wings kept off all harm.” (Our ornithological homeschool poem-of-the-week, from the early American poet Anne Bradstreet, for Mother’s Day, the second Sunday in May.)
🌳 HOMESCHOOL HOLIDAYS: Happy Arbor Day Weekend!
![[Arbor Day Stamp 1932]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/arbor-day-stamp-1932-130x150.jpg)
It’s National Arbor Day! Why not celebrate this delightful dendrological occasion by planting a tree in honor of your homeschool this week.
🎂 🎭 HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WILL! (Shakespeare, That Is)
Happy birthday to the Bard! Celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday this week with some free teaching materials from Shakespeare’s birthplace itself.
🎵 HOMESCHOOL MUSIC: Relax With Randall Thompson’s “Alleluia”
Feeling cooped up and stressed out? Calm your homeschool down with the peaceful “Alleluia” of American composer Randall Thompson, born on this day in 1899.
