🌕 THE LUNAR SOCIETY of the River Houses

“Men work together,” I told him from the heart,
“Whether they work together or apart.”

— Robert Frost, “The Tuft of Flowers”

The Internet provides exceptional opportunities for homeschool students to participate in real “citizen-science” projects in a wide variety of fields. The Lunar Society is another big and wonderful River Houses plan that will bring those students together. Instead of leaving homeschoolers to work by themselves, the Lunar Society will encourage students who are participating in cooperative projects to share their accomplishments each month on an easily remembered occasion: the day of the full moon.

Here is a selected list of some of the online citizen-science activities that are available now and that we think are suitable for homeschoolers working at a high school level (or even an advanced middle school level). You and your students can join any of these projects today. They cover a wide range of academic subject-areas and so will appeal to many different interests; some require active participation while others are more passive; some are indoors and some are outdoors; all will help students learn valuable practical and academic skills.

• ➢ eBird (ebird.org) — A project to map bird observations in your local area and around the world, sponsored by Cornell University. eBird includes the Great Backyard Bird Count (every February) and Project FeederWatch (specifically for backyard bird-feeder watchers).
• ➢ Berkeley Distributed Computing Projects (berkeley.edu) — This is an umbrella project supporting a great variety of individual scientific studies that use your computer’s idle time to work on extended calculations. All you have to do is download a small application that runs in the background on your computer, and while you’re sitting back and relaxing, it will be analyzing data on earthquakes or proteins or galaxies. We already participate in four of these projects (and there are many others also available):
• ➢ Asteroids@Home (asteroidsathome.net) — A project sponsored by the Astronomical Institute of Charles University in Prague to determine the shapes and orbital characteristics of asteroids in our solar system. (Here’s a placeholder page for our River Houses Asteroids@Home team.)
• ➢ Einstein@Home (einsteinathome.org) — A project sponsored by a group of international scientific organizations to search for gravitational waves and pulsars in deep space. (Here’s a placeholder page for our River Houses Einstein@Home team.)
• ➢ MilkyWay@Home (milkyway.cs.rpi.edu) — A project sponsored by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to study the structure and history of the Milky Way galaxy. (Here’s a placeholder page for our MilkyWay@Home team.)
• ➢ PrimeGrid (primegrid.com) — A project sponsored by mathematician Rytis Slatkevičius and a team of volunteer developers that attempts to discover very large prime numbers. (And here’s a placeholder page for our PrimeGrid team.) (UPDATE: We found one! The River Houses has discovered a Prime Number previously unknown in the world of Prime Numbers: 241,765,100¹³¹⁰⁷² + 1. If your homeschool joins the PrimeGrid project, you might just discover the next one!)
• ➢ Fireball Reports at the American Meteor Society (amsmeteors.org) — A project to track fireballs (exceptionally bright meteors) and estimate their altitude, direction, and possible areas of impact. (Here’s the very basic profile page for the observations I’ve contributed.) This is a difficult project to work on consistently because it’s naturally unpredictable, but if you enjoy skywatching you should look into it so you will know how to document any future observations you may make. (For observers outside the United States, try the associated International Meteor Organization.)
• ➢ The Historical Marker Database (hmdb.org) — Look up your own city or town to find the historical markers and monuments in your neighborhood, and then submit your own photos to further document the history of your community. It’s a great neighborhood-focused educational activity for everyone in your homeschool.
• ➢ NASA Citizen Science (nasa.gov) — A wide assortment of NASA-sponsored earth and space projects that citizen-scientists can join.
• ➢ Nature’s Notebook (usanpn.org) — Help scientists track the progress of the seasons across the North American continent with this citizen-science project sponsored by the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Phenology Network.
• ➢ Personal Weather Station Network (wunderground.com) — Get your own weather station for your backyard and connect it with thousands of others around the world.
• ➢ U.S. Geological Survey National Map Corps (usgs.gov) — Help to verify and update local map data in your community and make an important contribution to improved mapping all across the United States.
• ➢ U.S. Library of Congress “By the People” Projects (loc.gov) — An excellent opportunity to help tag and transcribe historical documents at the Library of Congress. If you have history-minded students in your homeschool this site is definitely worth investigating. (They also have “For Educators” recommendations on how to use these projects with students.)
• ➢ U.S. National Archives “Citizen Archivist” Project (archives.gov) — Another excellent opportunity for history-minded students to help transcribe and analyze historical documents at the U.S. National Archives. There’s an ever-changing list of missions (projects) available to work on, ranging from letters sent to Abraham Lincoln to soldiers’ records from World War I.
• ➢ Wikimedia Commons Photo Challenge (wikimedia.org) — Do you have a budding photographer in your homeschool? The Wikimedia Foundation has a monthly photography contest to encourage people to produce freely available images on a variety of themes. We put up a special River Houses post about the Photo Challenge every month.
• ➢ Zooniverse Projects (zooniverse.org) — A big clearinghouse for citizen-science, with dozens of opportunities available in many different fields. This is one of the best places to explore if you want to find a new homeschool project to take up.

Look these projects over and see if any of them catch your interest and the interest of your students, and before you know it your little home academy will become an international investigative powerhouse. 🔬 🔭 🖥 🦋 🔍 🦆 ⚗️ 🌸 ✒️ 📖 🌲 😊

But … what does all this have to do with the moon? 🌕 Well, there was a famous science-and-technology club in England in the late 1700s and early 1800s called the Lunar Society of Birmingham (because they met each month around the time of the full moon). They discussed current scientific developments, shared new discoveries, talked about the latest inventions, and generally had a grand old time.

I’m hoping that within the River Houses we’ll be able to bring together homeschoolers participating in a number of these citizen-science projects, and each month at the full moon we can have a kind of round-up of the things our members have accomplished (and we can have a grand old time, too). Imagine hundreds (thousands?) of homeschoolers across the country learning about and contributing to interesting investigations like these with their River Houses friends. That’s the Lunar Society — a nice idea for the future.

What delightful discoveries have you made in your homeschool this month? 😊

❡ The friends who made the future: Learn more about the original Lunar Society of Birmingham in “The Lunar Men,” a fine short video from History West Midlands.

❡ Whether they work together or apart: Each month on the full moon we post a Lunar Society Bulletin with updates on some of the projects listed above. Add your name to our free weekly mailing list to get these bulletins and a host of other great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🗞