🌝 KNOW YOUR MOONS 🌑🌒🌓🌔🌕🌖🌗🌘🌑

Can your homeschool students recognize the phases of the moon? Why not teach them about the lunar cycle this month, the month each year when we remember the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20th of 1969.

❡ The moon today: The easiest way to look up the current phase of the moon is with the handy timeanddate.com website. Just enter your location and you’ll be able to see not only the moon’s current phase but also the times of moonrise and moonset in your neighborhood. Today’s posting date (6 July 2024) is a perfect day to start a monthly moon lesson, because yesterday the moon was new and today and tomorrow it will be a thin crescent in the west at sunset. Take your students out to see, and then watch it every night over the next two weeks as it grows to full.

Did you know there’s an emoji symbol for each phase of the moon? It’s true! Whenever we’re posting about the moon here at the River Houses we try to use the correct emoji, and you can do the same, illustrating the moon’s phases for your students, quizzing them with emojis, and inviting them to recite the northern-hemisphere formula, “fills in from the right, drains out to the left”:

🌑 NEW
🌒 WAXING CRESCENT
🌓 FIRST QUARTER
🌔 WAXING GIBBOUS
🌕 FULL (second quarter)
🌖 WANING GIBBOUS
🌗 THIRD QUARTER
🌘 WANING CRESCENT
🌑 NEW (again)

A complete cycle, from new to new or full to full, is one (lunar) month — about 29 days, depending upon various orbital and measurement technicalities. The words month and moon are in fact cognate words, having the same historical origin. (Compare the expression, “many moons ago,” meaning, “many months ago.”)

The time from one quarter to the next — from new to first quarter, from first quarter to full (second quarter), from full to third quarter, and from third quarter to new again — is about seven days, and that’s the basis for the week, which is a quarter of a month: four quarters in one “moon,” four weeks in one month. (This also explains why lunar terminology can be confusing to beginners: the first and third “quarter” moons are half full, because “quarter” doesn’t refer to the moon’s appearance but rather to one quarter-part of the monthly lunar cycle.)

Chapter 4 in our recommended Backyard Guide to the Night Sky is all about the moon, with notes on its geological (or more properly, its selenological) history, maps of the major craters and seas, explanations of its orbit and its phases, and much more. It’s just the thing for a homeschool read-aloud. (You can also find a host of lunar facts in the astronomical section of your recommended world almanac.)

What celestial observations will you and your students be making in your homeschool this lunar month? 🌝

❡ Crescent and gibbous and waxing and waning: The word crescent is common in English in many contexts, but the word gibbous — convex, bulging, humped, hunchbacked — is much less common and is rarely used today to describe anything other than the moon, which is a shame because it’s a wonderful word. Similarly, waxing (growing, increasing) and waning (shrinking, decreasing) are used most often now as paired terms in the context of the moon, but they do still survive in a few other contexts (to wax poetic; his interest waned). 🌔 🌘

❡ Watchers of the skies: This is one of our regular Homeschool Astronomy posts. Subscribe to our free River Houses newsletter to get more great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox every week. 🔭

❡ 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! 🗓

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