The River Houses Homeschool Network

🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 17 January 2021

17 January 2021 by Bob O'Hara

Quick Freshes are our regular Sunday notes on the homeschool week ahead. Pick one or two (or more!) of the items below each week and use them to enrich your homeschooling schedule. Add your name to our free mailing list to get posts like these delivered right to your mailbox each week. Visit our River Houses calendar page to print your own homeschool calendars and planners for the entire year.

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Mississippi, and our COUNTRIES are India 🇮🇳, Indonesia 🇮🇩, Iran 🇮🇷, and Iraq 🇮🇶. (Our separate Sunday States & Countries post for the week went up just a few minutes ago.)

🌒 THE MOON at the beginning of this week is a waxing crescent — a good time for stargazing! You can explore the night sky and the features of the moon in your recommended backyard astronomy guide and your homeschool world atlas, and you can learn a host of stellar and lunar facts on pages 371–386 in your almanac. Browse through our many astronomy posts for even more.

🗓 TODAY, Sunday (17 January 2021) — Today is the 17th day of 2021; there are 348 days remaining in this common year. Learn more about different kinds of modern and historical calendars on pages 387–393 in your River Houses almanac. 📚 Benjamin Franklin was born on this day in 1706 in Boston, Massachusetts. 📰 And one of the most important battles in the Southern Theater of the American Revolution, the Battle of Cowpens, took place on this day in 1781 near Cowpens, South Carolina. ⚔️

Monday (18 January 2021) — Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a federal holiday in the United States. Lift every voice and sing! 🇺🇸 On this day in 1788, the first convict ships from Britain, now known as the First Fleet, arrived at Botany Bay, Australia. 🇦🇺 And today is the birthday of the Polish-British mathematician and historian of science Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974), creator of the pioneering documentary series “The Ascent of Man.” 📺

Tuesday (19 January 2021) — Today is the birthday of the polemical American lawyer and freedom-philosopher Lysander Spooner (1808–1887). ⚖️ It’s also the birthday of the spooky American poet and short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849). 👻

Wednesday (20 January 2021) — One of the first two men to walk on the moon, American astronaut Buzz Aldrin, was born on this day in 1930. 👨‍🚀 And our Wednesday tour of World Heritage Sites this week will take you to the Sangiran Early Man Site in Indonesia. 🇮🇩

Thursday (21 January 2021) — Today is St. Agnes Day, named for Agnes of Rome, a teenage Christian martyr of the fourth century and a favorite subject of artists and writers for hundreds of years. On this day, saith tradition, young girls will have their future husbands revealed to them in their dreams: “Agnes sweet, and Agnes fair, / Hither, hither, now repair; / Bonny Agnes, let me see / The lad who is to marry me.” 👰

Friday (22 January 2021) — Today is the birthday of two great English poets: John Donne (1573–1631) and George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824). 🖋 And our homeschool poem-of-the-week for last week of January is John Masefield’s “Sea Fever,” in memory of the Space Shuttle Challenger and its crew, who died 28 January 1986. 🌊 Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us throughout the year. 🗓 Our Friday Bird Families post this week will introduce you to the New World Vultures, the Ospreys, and the Hawks, Kites, and Eagles. Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways. 🦅

Saturday (23 January 2021) — On this day in 1849, the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States, Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910), graduated from the Geneva Medical College in New York. 👩‍⚕️

Sunday (24 January 2021) — On this day in 1848, James W. Marshall discovered gold at Sutter’s Mill, California, touching off the California Gold Rush. ⛏

🥂 OUR WEEKLY TOAST: “May obstacles entice enterprise and ensure perseverance.”

❡ Toasts can be a fun educational tradition for your family table. We offer one each week — you can take it up, or make up one of your own (“To North American dinosaurs!”), or invite a different person to come up with one for each meal (“To unpredictability in toasting!”). Many of our current toasts are taken from an old anthology called Toasts and Tributes: A Happy Book of Good Cheer (New York, 1904). What will you toast this week? 🥂

🌍 🇮🇷 EVERYTHING FLOWS: Iran in western Asia is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Haraz River, which flows across northern Iran and empties into the Caspian Sea. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Haraz River entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

The Haraz River in northern Iran. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

❡ Daughters of Ocean: Why not do a homeschool study of world rivers over the course of the year? Take the one we select each week (above), or start with the river lists in your almanac (pages 699–701), and make it a project to look them all up in your atlas, or in a handy encyclopedia either online or on a weekly visit to your local library. A whole world of geographical learning awaits you. 🌍

What do you have planned for your homeschool this week? 😊

❡ Lively springs: This is one of our regular “Quick Freshes” posts looking at the homeschool week ahead. Add your name to our River Houses mailing list and get these weekly messages delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. You can also print your own River Houses calendars of educational events and follow along with us. 🗓

🌎 🇺🇸 SUNDAY STATES: Mississippi, India, Iraq, and More

17 January 2021 by Bob O'Hara

Tour the United States and travel the countries of the world each week with the River Houses. Our Sunday States & Countries posts will point the way.

Many homeschoolers like to review the U.S. states and the nations of the world each year, and our recommended homeschool reference library includes a current world almanac, a world atlas, and a history encyclopedia that make these reviews fun and easy. Our own annual review begins at the start of the River Houses year in September and goes through the states in the traditional order of admission to the Union (almanac page 458), so this week’s state is:

🇺🇸
Mississippi State Flag
MISSISSIPPI (the 20th state, 10 December 1817) — The Magnolia State. Capital: Jackson. Mississippi can be found on page 583 in your almanac and on plates 42 and 142 in your atlas. Name origin: “Probably Chippewa mici zibi, meaning ‘great river’ or ‘gathering-in of all the waters.’ Also Algonquin word messipi ” (almanac page 459). State bird: Northern Mockingbird (bird guide page 416). Website: www.ms.gov.

❡ Little lessons: You can teach a hundred little lessons with our state-of-the-week, using your reference library as a starting point. Find the location of the state capital in your atlas each week. Look up the state bird in your bird guide. Read the almanac’s one-paragraph history aloud each week. Using each state’s official website (above), find and copy the preamble to that state’s constitution into a commonplace book over the course of the year. Practice math skills by graphing each state’s population and area. Look up the famous state residents listed in your almanac either online or at your local library. The possibilities are endless and they can be easily adapted to each student’s age and interests. Pick a simple pattern to follow for just a few minutes each week and your little lesson is done. By the end of the year, without even realizing it, your students will have absorbed a wealth of new geographical and historical information, as well as a host of valuable reading and research skills. 😊

❡ Maps to color: National Geographic has a large blank United States map and a blank world map, complete with flags, printable in sections and ready to receive the colored pencils of your students. Why not give them a try this week. 🖍

We go through the countries of the world in alphabetical order, so this week’s countries, with their official websites, are:

🇮🇳 INDIA in southern Asia. Population: 1,326,093,247. Capital: New Delhi. Government: Federal parliamentary republic. Website: www.india.gov.in (in English and Hindi).
🇮🇩 INDONESIA in southeastern Asia. Population: 267,026,366. Capital: Jakarta. Government: Presidential republic. Website: indonesia.go.id (in Indonesian and English).
🇮🇷 IRAN in southwestern Asia. Population: 84,923,314. Capital: Tehran. Government: Theocratic republic. Website: www.president.ir (in Persian, English, and Arabic).
🇮🇶 IRAQ in the Middle East. Population: 38,872,655. Capital: Baghdad. Government: Federal parliamentary republic. Website: www.pmo.iq (in Arabic and English).

These all appear in your current almanac, atlas, and history encyclopedia as well. The almanac, for example, has profiles of the nations of the world on pages 752–859; the endpapers of the atlas are index maps that will show you where each of the individual national and regional maps can be found; the history encyclopedia includes individual national histories on pages 489–599; and you can find additional illustrations, flags, and other mentions through the indexes in each of these volumes.

What grand global geographical excursions (real or virtual) have you been making in your homeschool this Orion Term? 😊

❡ Read and think critically: The country links above go to official websites, which are not always in English and which may well be propagandistic in one way or another, thus offering older students a good opportunity to exercise their critical reading and thinking skills. 🔍

❡ Come, here’s the map: Teaching your students to be fluent with high-quality maps — not just basically competent, but fluent — is one of the best educational gifts you can give them. Why not look up any one of our selected states or countries each week in your recommended homeschool atlas and show your students how to locate rivers, lakes, marshes, water depths, mountains and their elevations, highway numbers, airports, oil fields, railroads, ruins, battle sites, small towns, big cities, regional capitals, national capitals, parks, deserts, glaciers, borders, grid references, lines of longitude and latitude, and much more. There is so much information packed into professional maps of this kind that a magnifying glass is always helpful, even for young folks with good eyesight. The endpapers of the atlas and the technical map-reading information on Plate 2 will guide you in your voyages of discovery. 🗺

❡ Plan an imaginary vacation: Here’s a fun exercise for your students: take one of the countries that we list each week and write out a family travel plan. How would you get there? How much will it cost? Will you need a passport? Where will you stay? Will you have to exchange your currency? How do you say hello the local language? What cities and attractions and landmarks will you visit? What foods will you eat? How will you get around (car, train, boat, mule)? Make a simple worksheet with blank spaces for the answers, have your students do the research, and start planning your world tour. ✈️ 🚞 🚗 🛳 🐎 😊

❡ The great globe itself: This is one of our regular Sunday States & Countries posts. Print your own River Houses States & Countries Calendar and follow along with us as we take an educational tour of the United States and the whole world over the course of the homeschool year. And don’t forget to add your name to our free mailing list to get more great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox every week. 🇺🇸 🌎

🔭 🌒 SATURDAY STARS: Telescope Tips from the U.S. Naval Observatory

16 January 2021 by Bob O'Hara

The moon this week is a beautiful waxing crescent, and that’s an ideal time to take a good long look at it through a small telescope.

The moon as seen through a 4-inch telescope on 2 March 2020 from Alexandria, Virginia. The largest dark area in the center is the Sea of Tranquility, where Apollo 11 landed in 1969. (Image: Geoff Chester via the U.S. Naval Observatory.)

If you’re one of the lucky home academies that received a telescope this holiday season (or if you already have one), why not spend some quality time with the moon this week. That’s the advice of the U.S. Naval Observatory in their current issue of “The Sky This Week“:

Luna is a great target for first-time telescope owners. I often say that the Moon is “looked over, then overlooked,” but spending time exploring her many varied surface features can be a wonderful retreat from the constant barrage of the 24-hour news cycle. As our closest neighbor in space even small instruments will show an abundance of detail, and it helps to have an atlas of the Moon handy for your exploration. There are many of these available online. The Moon’s larger features bear names that were for the most part assigned long ago by the first astronomers to gaze on her with crude telescopes. Her darker areas are known as “seas” (“maria” in Latin), “lakes” (“lacus”), “bays” (“sinus”), etc. and bear names like Mare Imbrium (Sea of Rains) and Sinus Iridum (Bay of Rainbows). These large-scale features are the remnants of collisions with large asteroids early in the history of the solar system’s formation. Individual smaller craters are named after famous people from classical astronomical literature as well as more modern contributors to lunar science. Each successive night reveals new features along the “terminator” which is the sunrise/sunset line that creeps slowly eastward from our point of view. The low Sun angle along the terminator throws features into stunning relief as ink-black shadows give way to dazzling sunlit terrain. A 3- or 4-inch aperture telescope will show many hundreds of features and terrain textures. Spend some time taking good long looks at our fair neighbor and you’ll want to return each month. (usno.navy.mil)

Our recommended backyard astronomy guide includes a good illustrated introduction to the moon (pages 67–79) that will help you give names to the major craters and seas, and understand the moon’s structure, history, and visible phases. And our recommended world atlas has a magnificent large map of the entire lunar surface, both near-side and far-side.

What celestial sights and astronomical apparitions have you been examining in your homeschool this Orion Term? 🔭

❡ All the star-sown sky: Teaching your students the major constellations and the names of the principal stars is one of the simplest and most enduring gifts you can give them. Our recommended backyard star guide and homeschool world atlas both contain charts of the constellations that will help you learn your way around the heavens. Find a dark-sky spot near you this month and spend some quality homeschool time with your students beneath the starry vault. ✨

❡ Star bright: If you’d like some light and easy homeschool astronomy lessons, download and print a copy of our annual River Houses Star Calendar and follow along with us month by month as we make twelve heavenly friends-for-life over the course of the year. 🌟

❡ The starry archipelagoes: The regular “Sky This Week” posts from the U.S. Naval Observatory, such as the one we quoted above, are published each Tuesday and usually focus on one or two special astronomical events or phenomena. If you have high school science students in your homeschool, why not have them read these well-written pages aloud to you each week, or ask them to study them and then narrate a summary back to you. 🌌

❡ Watchers of the skies: This is one of our regular Homeschool Astronomy posts. Add your name to our free River Houses mailing list and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox every week. 🔭

🖋 🎵 WONDERFUL WORDS (and Music!): Lift Every Voice and Sing

15 January 2021 by Bob O'Hara

The American minister and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was born on this day in 1929, and in his honor our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the third week of January is “Lift Every Voice and Sing” by James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938). (The Martin Luther King federal holiday this year will be observed on Monday the 18th, the third Monday in January.)

“Lift Every Voice” was written for a Lincoln’s Birthday celebration in the year 1900 at the then-segregated Stanton School in Jacksonville, Florida, where James Weldon Johnson was a teacher. Johnson’s brother, the composer John Rosamond Johnson (1873–1954), set the words to music. “Lift Every Voice” became so popular that within a few years it came to be known as “the Negro National Hymn” — and now today, as a great patriotic song for all Americans:

Lift Every Voice and Sing

Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us.
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in Thy path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand, may we forever stand,
True to our God, true to our native land.

Here’s a wonderful live performance of “Lift Every Voice,” arranged by musicologist Roland Carter and sung by the Winston Salem State University Choir in North Carolina, with Carter himself as conductor:

➢

I’d like to think Abraham Lincoln, James Weldon Johnson, and Martin Luther King Jr. would all agree with that well-earned round of applause.

What wonderful words and poetical productions have you been studying in your homeschool this Orion Term? 😊

❡ Making a new friend: When you introduce your students to a new poem, especially one in a traditional form, take your time, and be sure to show them the craftsmanship in the work. “Lift Every Voice” has three stanzas of ten lines each — that already looks quite carefully structured. What about the rhyme scheme? Look at how detailed, complex, and regular it is: I’d mark up the first stanza as AA BCCB DD EE. What about the second and third stanzas? Exactly the same — that’s quite a precise accomplishment. By investigating these details of structure your students will come to appreciate good poems as carefully crafted pieces of literary labor. 🖋

❡ Till earth and heaven ring: If a special line or turn of phrase happens to strike you in one of our weekly poems, just copy it onto your homeschool bulletin board for a few days and invite your students to speak it aloud — that’s all it takes to begin a new poetical friendship and learn a few lovely words that will stay with you for life. 😊

❡ Literary lives: The website of the Poetry Foundation includes biographical notes and examples of the work of many important poets (including James Weldon Johnson) that are suitable for high school students and homeschool teachers. 🖋

❡ Explore more: For a quick homeschool review of the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr., turn to page 432 in your River Houses history encyclopedia (riverhouses.org/books). 📚

❡ Here, said the year: This post is one of our regular homeschool poems-of-the-week. Add your name to our River Houses mailing list to get posts like these delivered right to your mailbox, and print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar to follow along with us as we visit fifty of our favorite friends over the course of the year. 📖

🐦 WINTER BIRD-FEEDING SEASON is Here!

15 January 2021 by Bob O'Hara

Winter is upon us and this is a perfect time to start thinking about feeding birds in your backyard. It’s one of the simplest and most educational homeschool activities you can do during the winter season.

Whether you’re a beginning backyard birder or an old hand, the resource you’ll want to explore is Project FeederWatch from Cornell University:

➢ Project Feederwatch from Cornell University (feederwatch.org)

➢ Beginner’s Guide to Winter Bird Feeding (printable pdf)

Why not print out their short beginner’s guide and have your students study it and develop a bird feeding plan for your homeschool.

If you’re in the market for a feeder you’ll find that there are many different types available. Here are some selections at Amazon.com that you can explore — browse around and find one or two that would fit well in your own backyard setting:

➢ Tube and Hopper Feeders, favored by chickadees, finches, and sparrows

➢ Platform Feeders, favored by ground-loving birds such as cardinals

➢ Suet Feeders, favored by woodpeckers and nuthatches

➢ Window Feeders, for close-up views

If your students watch carefully over the course of the winter, they will discover that different bird species exhibit different behaviors: chickadees will generally pick up a single seed and fly away with it; winter finches, by contrast, will usually perch and keep eating until something scares them away. Cardinals will generally choose a flat surface to feed on if one is available, while finches will happily feed from slender perches well off the ground. Woodpeckers won’t usually be attracted to your seed offerings, but they will readily come to a suet feeder.

Why not set up a homeschool bird feeder or two this winter and see how many educational discoveries you can make in your own backyard. 😊

❡ Books in the running brooks: Our recommended homeschool reference library includes an excellent bird guide that would serve your homeschool well. Many other similar guides are also available — find one that’s a good fit for your family and take it with you on all your outings, whether far afield or just out to the backyard. 🦉

❡ Homeschool birds: We think bird study is one of the best subjects you can take up in a homeschool environment. It’s suitable for all ages, it can be made as elementary or as advanced as you wish, and birds can be found just about anywhere at any season of the year. Why not track your own homeschool bird observations on the free eBird website sponsored by Cornell University. It’s a great way to learn more about what’s in your local area and about how bird populations change from season to season. 🦆

❡ Nature notes: This is one of our regular Homeschool Natural History posts. Add your name to our weekly mailing list and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🐦

🦅 FRIDAY BIRD FAMILIES: Herons, Bitterns, Ibises, and Spoonbills

15 January 2021 by Horace the Otter 🦦

Every Friday we invite you and your homeschool students to learn about a different group of North American birds in your recommended bird guide. It’s a great way to add a few minutes of informal science, geography, natural history, and imagination to your homeschool schedule throughout the year.

This week’s birds (two different families) are the Herons and Bitterns (pages 258–265) and the Ibises and Spoonbills (pages 266–267).

If you’re teaching younger children, the way to use these posts is just to treat your bird guide as a picture book and spend a few minutes each week looking at all the interesting birds they may see one day. With that, your little lesson is done.

If you have older students, one of your objectives should be to help them become fluent with a technical reference book that’s packed with information, the kind of book they will encounter in many different fields of study. Here’s how your bird guide introduces this week’s birds:

HERONS · BITTERNS — Family Ardeidae. Wading birds; most have long legs, neck, and bill for stalking food in shallow water. Graceful crests and plumes adorn some species in breeding season. Soft-part colors also brighten on most species, especially at onset of breeding season. This plumage is referred to as ‘high breeding.’ On some species, these colors can become more intense suddenly, only to fade a few minutes later. Species: 63 World, 20 N.A. [North America]

IBISES · SPOONBILLS — Family Threskiornithidae. Gregarious, heronlike birds that feed with long, specialized bills: slender and decurved in ibises, wide and spatulate in spoonbills. Species: 34 World, 4 N.A.

When you’re training your young naturalists, teach them to ask and answer from their bird guide some of the first questions any naturalist would ask about a new group — about the Ibises and Spoonbills, for example. How many species? (34 worldwide.) Are there any near us? (Only 4 species in North America, and the individual maps will give us more detail.) What are their distinctive features? (Gregarious, long-legged and long-necked, specialized bills, and so on.) (And “gregarious” and “spatulate” are certainly a wonderful words, aren’t they — be sure to send someone to your homeschool dictionary to look them up.) 🔎

Pick a representative species or two to look at in detail each week and read the entry aloud, or have your students study it and then narrate it back to you, explaining all the information it contains. This week, for the Heron family, why not investigate one of biggest and most widespread herons in North America: the Great Blue Heron (page 258).

All sorts of biological information is packed into the brief species descriptions in your bird guide — can your students tease it out? How big is the Great Blue Heron? (46 inches tall — nearly four feet — with a six-foot wingspan.) What is its scientific name? (Ardea herodias.) Will you be able to find this species where you live? (Probably, since it occurs across all of North America.) At what times of year and in what habitat? (Study the range map and range description carefully to answer those questions, and see the book’s back flap for a map key.) Do the males and females look alike? The adults and juveniles? What song or call does this species make? How can you distinguish it from similar species? (The text and illustrations should answer all these questions.)

The Great Blue Heron is a magnificent bird, and one of the biggest birds the average person in the United States is ever likely to see. They are reasonably tolerant of humans and can be found on the banks of urban ponds and streams as well as in remoter areas. Like almost all herons, they generally feed by standing motionless in shallow water and darting their long necks out to grab unsuspecting fish, frogs, or invertebrates as they pass by. In flight, even at a distance, herons can easily be distinguished from other long-necked bird such as cranes because they fly with their necks pulled back rather than extended.

For the Ibis and Spoonbill family, why not look at one of the most spectacular North American birds, the Roseate Spoonbill (page 266).

Spoonbills are large heronlike birds with, as their name suggests, strange spoon-shaped (spatulate) bills. They’re mainly found in Central America but do occur up along the Gulf Coast and around into southern Florida. (Those of us in the northern tier are out of luck on this species.)

You can do little ten-minute lessons of this kind with any of the species in your bird guide that catch your interest. Pick a species that is near you, or one that looks striking, or one that has a strange name, and explore. You could look at, for example, one of the tiniest herons, the Least Bittern (page 258), only a foot long and very good at hiding deep in the marshes.

In all these Friday Bird Families posts, our aim is not to present a specific set of facts to memorize. We hope instead to provide examples and starting points that you and your students can branch away from in many different directions. We also hope to show how you can help your students develop the kind of careful skills in reading, observation, and interpretation that they will need in all their future academic work.

What ornithological observations and naturalistical notes have you been making in your homeschool this Orion Term? 😊

❡ Homeschool birds: We think bird study is one of the best subjects you can take up in a homeschool environment. It’s suitable for all ages, it can be made as elementary or as advanced as you wish, it can be made solitary or social, and birds can be found just about anywhere at any season of the year. Why not track your own homeschool bird observations on the free eBird website sponsored by Cornell University. It’s a great way to learn more about what’s in your local area and about how bird populations change from season to season. 🐦

❡ Enchiridion: The front matter in your bird guide (pages 6–13) explains a little bit about basic bird biology and about some of the technical terminology used throughout the book — why not have your students study it as a special project. Have them note particularly the diagrams showing the parts of a bird (pages 10–11) so they’ll be able to tell primaries from secondaries and flanks from lores. 🦉

❡ Words for birds: You may not think of your homeschool dictionary as a nature reference, but a comprehensive dictionary will define and explain many of the standard scientific terms you will encounter in biology and natural history, although it will not generally contain the proper names of species or other taxonomic groups that aren’t part of ordinary English. (In other words, you’ll find “flamingo” but not Phoenicopterus, the flamingo genus.) One of the most important things students should be taught to look for in the dictionary is the information on word origins: knowing the roots of scientific terms makes it much easier to understand them and remember their meaning. 📖

❡ Come, here’s the map: Natural history and geography are deeply interconnected. One of the first questions you should teach your students to ask about any kind of animal or plant is, “What is its range? Where (in the world) does it occur?” Our recommended homeschool reference library includes an excellent world atlas that will help your students appreciate many aspects of biogeography, the science of the geographical distribution of living things. 🌎

❡ Nature notes: This is one of our regular Friday Bird Families posts for homeschool naturalists. Print your own copy of our River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow along with us! You can also add your name to our free weekly mailing list to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🐦 🦉 🦆 🦃 🦅

🗓 🗡 HAPPY CROSS-QUARTER DAY of Orion Term 2020–2021

14 January 2021 by Bob O'Hara

The educational value of the calendar is one of our themes in the River Houses, and we divide the homeschool year into four three-month terms (quarters) that are named after prominent seasonal constellations of the northern hemisphere:

🦢 Fall or Cygnus Term (September–November)
🗡 Winter or Orion Term (December–February)
🦁 Spring or Leo Term (March–May)
💪 Summer or Hercules Term (June–August)

Today, January 14th, is the midpoint of Orion Term — in many old calendar systems it would be called the cross-quarter day of Orion Term.

The cross-quarter day of each term is a good day to look around and see how things are going. Is your schedule working well? Did you have a plan for some task or project that didn’t turn out as expected and just needs to be dropped? Is there something new you need to add?

If you haven’t already, why not print out one or two of our simple one-page calendars and planners for this 2020–2021 homeschool year — they won’t constrain you, and they’ll help to give a light structure to your own homeschool year:

➢ River Houses Homeschool Calendars and Planners

And also if you haven’t, why not sign up for our free once-a-week email newsletter:

➢ Weekly River Houses Homeschool Newsletter

If you belong to other online or offline homeschool groups, won’t you share our newsletter link with them? We’d be delighted to have more subscribers!

What calendrical events have you been marking and what educational discoveries have you been making in your homeschool this Orion Term? 😊

❡ Quarter days and cross-quarter days: Dividing the year into quarters is an ancient and natural practice: the annual movement of the sun across the sky automatically gives us two equinoxes, two solstices, and four seasons. Our four terms are just a simple modification of that arrangement so that our River Houses calendar will align more conveniently with the ordinary months — with the “meteorological seasons” rather than the astronomical seasons — and with the customary American school year. In many traditional calendrical systems, going back into the Middle Ages, the first day of each quarter is called the quarter day and the midpoint of each quarter is called the cross-quarter day. That means the quarter days of the River Houses year are 1 September, 1 December, 1 March, and 1 June, and the cross-quarter days are 16 October, 14 January (15 January in Leap Years), 15 April, and 16 July. (Fun fact: a vestige of the old system of quarter and cross-quarter days is Groundhog Day, also known as Candlemas on the Christian calendar: it’s the cross-quarter day between the winter solstice and the spring equinox.) Quarter days have for centuries been the traditional days on which school terms began, so homeschoolers who follow our four-term River Houses calendar are participating in a very ancient tradition indeed. 🗓

❡ Here, said the year: This is one of our occasional posts about our Homeschool Terms & Calendars. 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. 🗞

🌎 🇭🇳 WEEKLY WORLD HERITAGE: The Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve in Honduras

13 January 2021 by Bob O'Hara

Honduras in Central America is one of our homeschool countries-of-the-week, so why not spend a few minutes today learning about one of Honduras’ World Heritage Sites: the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve.

The Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve in Honduras. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

The Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve is part of the largest forest ecosystem in Central America:

Located in the Mosquitia region of northeastern Honduras, Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve is the largest protected area in the country with 350,000 hectares. The property protects the entire watershed of the Río Plátano all the way from the headwaters in the mountains to the river mouth on the Caribbean coast. Adding to its importance, the property is an integral part of a significantly larger conservation complex encompassing Tawahka Asangni Biosphere Reserve and Patuca National Park, among other protected areas. Taken as a whole, the conservation complex in northeastern Honduras is contiguous with Bosawas Biosphere Reserve in neighbouring Nicaragua, jointly constituting the largest contiguous forest area in Latin America north of the Amazon. Besides the remarkable dense rainforests in the mountains, there is a highly diverse array of distinct ecosystems in the coastal lowlands, including wetlands, savannah and coastal lagoons. Recognised as a nature conservation gem, the property also harbours notable archaeological and cultural values, with numerous Pre-Columbian sites and petroglyphs, as well as the living cultures of the various local and indigenous communities. Indigenous peoples and peoples of African descent in and around Río Plátano include the Pech, Tawahka, Miskito and Garífuna, living alongside the Mestizo (Ladino) population.

The property boasts an extraordinary diversity of ecosystems and species. For example, 586 species of vascular plants have been reported in the lowlands of the reserve. The over 721 species of vertebrates comprise more than half of all mammals known to occur in Honduras and include the critically endangered Mexican Spider Monkey, the endangered Central American Tapir, the vulnerable Giant Anteater and West Indian Manatee, as well as the near-threatened Jaguar and White-lipped Peccary. The endangered Great Green Macaw, the vulnerable Great Curassow and the near-threatened Guiana Crested Eagle and Harpy Eagle stand out among the impressive 411 documented species of birds. Taken together, reptiles and amphibians total about 108 species, with several species of poisonous snakes and 4 species marine turtles (Loggerhead, Leatherback, Green Turtle and Hawksbill Turtle). Freshwater fish include the economically important migratory Bobo Mullet or Cuyamel. (UNESCO World Heritage Centre #196)

You can find a gallery of additional photos of the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve on the World Heritage Centre’s website.

World Heritage Sites are cultural or natural landmarks of international significance, selected for recognition by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. More than 1000 such sites have been recognized in over 160 countries, and we feature one every Wednesday, drawn from one of our homeschool countries-of-the-week. You can find a complete list online at the UNESCO World Heritage Centre and in Wikipedia.

The World Heritage Centre also has a free and comprehensive World Heritage education kit for teachers, as well as a wonderful full-color wall map of World Heritage Sites, available for the cost of shipping. Why not add them both to your own homeschool library. 🗺

What world treasures have you been exploring in your homeschool this Orion Term? 😊

❡ Books in the running brooks: You can always turn to your River Houses almanac, atlas, and history encyclopedia for more information about any of our countries-of-the-week. The almanac has profiles of all the nations of the world on pages 752–859; the endpapers of the atlas are indexes that will show you where all of the individual national and regional maps may be found; the history encyclopedia includes national histories on pages 489–599; and you can find additional illustrations, flags, and other mentions through the indexes in each of these volumes. For an ideal little lesson, just write the name of the Weekly World Heritage Site on your homeschool bulletin board, find its location in your atlas, read the WHC’s brief description aloud, look at a picture or two, and you’re done. Over the course of the year, without even realizing it, your students will absorb a wealth of new historical, geographical, and cultural information. 🇭🇳

❡ The great globe itself: This is one of our regular Homeschool States & Countries posts featuring historical and natural sites of international importance. Download a copy of our River Houses World Heritage Calendar and follow along with us as we tour the planet, and add your name to our weekly mailing list to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🌎

🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 10 January 2021

10 January 2021 by Bob O'Hara

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Indiana, and our COUNTRIES are Haiti 🇭🇹, Honduras 🇭🇳, Hungary 🇭🇺, and Iceland 🇮🇸. (Our separate Sunday States & Countries post for the week went up just a few minutes ago.)

🌘 THE MOON at the beginning of this week is a waning crescent — a good time for stargazing! You can explore the night sky and the features of the moon in your recommended backyard astronomy guide and your homeschool world atlas, and you can learn a host of stellar and lunar facts on pages 371–386 in your almanac. Browse through our many astronomy posts for even more.

🗓 TODAY, Sunday (10 January 2021) — Today is the 10th day of 2021; there are 355 days remaining in this common year. Learn more about different kinds of modern and historical calendars on pages 387–393 in your River Houses almanac. 📚 On this day in the year 49 B.C., Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon river and approached the city of Rome with his army, touching off a civil war that led to the destruction of the Roman Republic and the eventual formation of the Roman Empire. ⚔️ For an illustrated overview of the life and times of Julius Caesar and his outsized impact on the Western world, see pages 108–109 in your homeschool history encyclopedia.

Monday (11 January 2021) — Today is the birthday of Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804), the first United States Secretary of the Treasury, whose portrait appears on our U.S. $10 bills. 💵 It’s also the birthday of William James (1842–1910), one of the founders of the modern field of psychology. 🧠

Tuesday (12 January 2021) — Today is the birthday of the French author Charles Perrault (1628–1703), who gave the world Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, and many other beloved fairy tales. 🛌 It’s also the birthday of the American writer Jack London (1876–1916). 🐺

Wednesday (13 January 2021) — The National Geographic Society was founded on this day in 1888 in Washington, D.C. 🗺 And our Wednesday tour of World Heritage Sites this week will take you to the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve in Honduras. 🇭🇳

Thursday (14 January 2021) — Today is the midpoint of Orion Term and thus one of the four cross-quarter days of the River Houses year. How are things going? 🗓 Today is also Ratification Day. On this day in 1784 in Annapolis, Maryland, Congress ratified the Treaty of Paris, officially ending the American Revolutionary War. 🕊

Friday (15 January 2021) — Queen Elizabeth I of England was crowned on this day in 1559. For an illustrated outline of the historical period named for her, turn to pages 260–261 in your homeschool history encyclopedia. 👑 Our Friday Bird Families post this week will introduce you to the long-legged Herons, Bitterns, Ibises, and Spoonbills. Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦅 And our poem-of-the-week for the third week of January is James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (1900), for American minister and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., born on this day in 1929. 🇺🇸 Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us throughout the year. 🖋

Saturday (16 January 2021) — On this day in the year 27 B.C., the Roman Senate conferred the title “Augustus” on the general and de facto dictator Octavian, and the last remnants of the old republic were swept away. 👑

Sunday (17 January 2021) — Benjamin Franklin was born on this day in 1706 in Boston, Massachusetts. 📰 And one of the most important battles in the Southern Theater of the American Revolution, the Battle of Cowpens, took place on this day in 1781 near Cowpens, South Carolina. ⚔️

🥂 OUR WEEKLY TOAST: “May mankind never cease to produce heroes.”

🌎 🇭🇹 EVERYTHING FLOWS: Haiti in the West Indies is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Artibonite River, the longest river in Haiti. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Artibonite River entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

AND DON’T FORGET: Friday the 13th comes on a Wednesday this month! 🙀

What do you have planned for your homeschool this week? 😊

🌎 🇺🇸 SUNDAY STATES: Indiana, Haiti, Iceland, and More

10 January 2021 by Bob O'Hara

Tour the United States and travel the countries of the world each week with the River Houses. Our Sunday States & Countries posts will point the way.

🇺🇸
Indiana State Flag
INDIANA (the 19th state, 11 Dec 1816) — The Hoosier State. Capital: Indianapolis. Indiana can be found on page 577 in your almanac and on plates 41 and 142 in your atlas. Name origin: “Means ‘land of the Indians’” (almanac page 459). State bird: Northern Cardinal (bird guide page 522). Website: www.in.gov.

We go through the countries of the world in alphabetical order, so this week’s countries, with their official websites, are:

🇭🇹 HAITI in the West Indies. Population: 11,067,777. Capital: Port-au-Prince. Government: Semi-presidential republic. Website: primature.gouv.ht (in French).
🇭🇳 HONDURAS in Central America. Population: 9,235,340. Capital: Tecucigalpa. Government: Presidential republic. Website: www.presidencia.gob.hn (in Spanish).
🇭🇺 HUNGARY in east-central Europe. Population: 9,771,827. Capital: Budapest. Government: Parliamentary republic. Website: kormany.hu (in Hungarian and English).
🇮🇸 ICELAND in the northern Atlantic Ocean. Population: 350,734. Capital: Reykjavik. Government: Parliamentary republic. Website: www.iceland.is (in English).

What grand global geographical excursions (real or virtual) have you been making in your homeschool this Orion Term? 😊

🌟 STAR BRIGHT: Capella for January

9 January 2021 by Bob O'Hara

January is the middle month of Orion Term in the River Houses, and as our monthly star calendar will tell you, January’s Great Star is Capella, the brightest star in the constellation Auriga the Charioteer. Its formal designation is α Aurigae — “alpha of Auriga.” Auriga and Capella are high in the northeast in the early evening this month, about half way between Orion and the Pole Star, and they pass overhead toward the west as the night goes on.

If you want to introduce your students to Capella and Auriga you can start with some basic astronomy and astronomical mythology from your backyard star guide:

Auriga is an elegant constellation in the heart of the Milky Way. It is easily identified by its alpha star, Capella, which is the seventh brightest star in the sky [at magnitude 0.1]. Auriga is an ancient constellation, one of Ptolemy’s original 48. Epsilon Aurigae (ε), the star just southwest of Capella, is an eclipsing binary, veiled every 27 years by an unknown companion. The next eclipse will begin in 2036.

There are a few stories associated with this constellation. The star Capella represents a mother goat that the charioteer carries on his back along with her three kids (the neighboring stars). Another story has it that the chariot and rider may represent Hephaestus, the crippled blacksmith god who built the vehicle to move about more easily. (Backyard Guide to the Night Sky, page 251)

That’s plenty for beginning students — your little lesson is done. If you want to get more advanced, the Wikipedia page on Capella is packed with additional information on everything from astrometry to cultural history.

Relative sizes of the four main stars in the Capella system: yellow giants Capella Aa and Capella Ab, and red dwarfs Capella H and Capella L, with our sun (Sol) for comparison. Note that this diagram is meant to show only the sizes of the respective stars, not their relative positions. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

The apparently single star we see as Capella is actually a quadruple star system made up of two yellow giants designated Capella Aa and Capella Ab, both much larger than our sun, and two red dwarf stars designated Capella H and Capella L, all orbiting one another. The two yellow giants are too close to each other to be distinguished with a telescope — they are separated by about the same distance as our sun and Venus — but the existence of the pair was established in the 1890s through study of Capella’s regularly changing spectrum month by month. The existence of the second red-dwarf pair within the Capella system, orbiting the two yellow giants at a much greater distance, was confirmed in 1936.

Capella is quite close to us in astronomical terms: only 43 light-years away. When we look at Capella today, we’re actually seeing light that was emitted from the system 43 years ago. The age of the Capella system is estimated to be 500–600 million years — much younger than our sun, which is a very old 4.6 billion.

Sometime this month, take your homeschool students out at dusk and introduce them to this great system of nearby suns, and teach them its name, and so give them a new friend for life.

What stellar observations have you been making in your homeschool this Orion Term? 😊

❡ Alpha and beta and gamma, oh my: Most of the principal stars within each constellation have both old vernacular names — Vega, Sirius, Arcturus, and so on — as well as more formal scientific designations. The German astronomer Johann Bayer (1572–1625) devised the formal system of star designations that is still in common use today. In Bayer’s system, the stars in each constellation, from brightest to dimmest, are assigned a lowercase letter of the Greek alphabet: α (alpha, brightest), β (beta, second brightest), γ (gamma, third brightest), δ (delta, fourth brightest), and so on. This letter designation is combined with the name of the constellation in its Latin possessive (genitive) form: Lyra becomes Lyrae (“of Lyra”), Canis Major becomes Canis Majoris (“of Canis Major”), and so on. The brightest star in the constellation Lyra (the star Vega) thus becomes α Lyrae (“alpha of Lyra”), the brightest star in Canis Major (the star Sirius) becomes α Canis Majoris (“alpha of Canis Major”), and so on, through all 24 Greek letters and all 88 constellations. How bright would you expect, say, the σ (sigma) star of Orion to be? Not very bright — it’s far down the alphabet — but σ Orionis happens to mark the top of Orion’s sword, so even though it’s not very bright it’s still notable and easy to locate on a dark night. ✨

❡ Star bright: The brightness of a star as we see it in our night sky is its magnitude — or more properly, its apparent magnitude. The scale of star magnitudes was developed long before modern measuring instruments were invented, so it can be a little bit confusing for beginners. Originally, the brightest stars in the sky were called “first magnitude” and the less-bright stars “second magnitude,” “third magnitude,” and so on, down to the dimmest stars visible to the naked eye, which were called “sixth magnitude.” In the nineteenth century the star Vega (our August star) was chosen as the standard brightness reference and its value on the magnitude scale was defined to be zero (0.0). Five steps in magnitude (from 0.0 to 5.0 or from 1.0 to 6.0) was defined to be a change in brightness of 100 times: a star 100 times dimmer than Vega (0.0) was defined to be a magnitude 5.0 star. Vega is not quite the brightest star is the sky, however, so the scale also had to be extended into negative numbers: Sirius (our March star), for example, is magnitude –1.5, about three times brighter than Vega (at 0.0). The planet Venus at its brightest is about magnitude –4.2; the full moon is about magnitude –12.9; the sun is magnitude –26.7. By contrast, the dimmest stars visible to the naked eye in a populated, light-polluted area are about magnitude 3.0; the dimmest stars visible under very dark conditions are about magnitude 6.5. The Hubble Space Telescope in orbit around the earth has photographed distant stars and galaxies below magnitude 30, the dimmest celestial objects humans have seen so far. 🌃

❡ And all dishevelled wandering stars: How far away are the stars? Do they all occupy a single celestial “dome” that rotates through the heavens (as some ancient and medieval astronomers believed), or are they scattered through space at different individual distances? Astronomers had long suspected that the fixed stars existed at different distances from us, but early attempts to measure those distances failed. It was not until the early 1800s that instruments and measuring techniques became precise enough to allow the first stellar distances to be calculated using the technique of parallax. Parallax is the displacement in the apparent position of an object with respect to the background when an observer moves from side to side. It’s an ordinary phenomenon you experience every day — it’s how we judge distances as we move through the landscape. Stellar parallaxes are extremely small — fractions of an arc-second (one 3600th of a degree) — and they are calculated by measuring a star’s position against the background at opposite sides of the earth’s orbit, six months apart. (That’s the astronomical equivalent of taking one step to the side.) Vega, our August star, was one of the first stars to have its parallax measured; modern estimates put it at about 0.13 arc-seconds. Apply some trigonometry, and that yields a distance of about 25 light-years. 🔭

❡ Watchers of the skies: Teaching your students to recognize the constellations is one of the simplest and most enduring gifts you can give them. We recommend the handy Backyard Guide to the Night Sky as a general family reference — it will help you identify all the northern hemisphere constellations and will point out many highlights, including the names and characteristics of the brightest stars. Your recommended world atlas also has beautiful maps of the whole northern and southern hemisphere night skies on plates 121–122. Why not find a dark-sky spot near you this month and spend some quality homeschool time beneath the starry vault. 🌌

❡ First star I see tonight: This is one of our regular Homeschool Astronomy posts featuring twelve of the most notable stars of the northern hemisphere night sky. Download and print your own copy of our River Houses Star Calendar and follow along with us as we visit a different Great Star each month — and make each one of them a homeschool friend for life. 🌟

🖋 ⛸ WONDERFUL WORDS: A Winter Poem for Homeschool Dads

8 January 2021 by Bob O'Hara

Here’s a wintertime poem-of-the-week to tug at your heartstrings: “Ice” by contemporary American poet Gail Mazur (b. 1937), for all homeschool fathers.

Ice

In the warming house, children lace their skates,
bending, choked, over their thick jackets.

A Franklin stove keeps the place so cozy
it’s hard to imagine why anyone would leave,

clumping across the frozen beach to the river.
December’s always the same at Ware’s Cove,

the first sheer ice, black, then white
and deep until the city sends trucks of men

with wooden barriers to put up the boys’
hockey rink. An hour of skating after school,

of trying wobbly figure-8’s, an hour
of distances moved backwards without falling,

then — twilight, the warming house steamy
with girls pulling on boots, their chafed legs

aching. Outside, the hockey players keep
playing, slamming the round black puck

until it’s dark, until supper. At night,
a shy girl comes to the cove with her father.

Although there isn’t music, they glide
arm in arm onto the blurred surface together,

braced like dancers. She thinks she’ll never
be so happy, for who else will find her graceful,

find her perfect, skate with her
in circles outside the emptied rink forever?

Most of our weekly poems are intended as examples for homeschool study, but a few are just for mom and dad to enjoy. Here’s hoping you and your family are enjoying the special warmth that only winter brings.

What wonderful words and poetical productions are you studying in your homeschool this Orion Term? 😊

❡ Literary lives: The website of the Poetry Foundation includes biographical notes and examples of the work of many important poets (including Gail Mazur) that are suitable for high school students and homeschool teachers. 🖋

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