The River Houses Homeschool Network

🖋 ⛸ WONDERFUL WORDS: A Winter Poem for Homeschool Dads

8 January 2022 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 winter brings.

What wonderful words and poetical productions have you been 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. 🖋

❡ Here, said the year: This post is one of our regular homeschool poems-of-the-week. 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, and add your name to our River Houses mailing list to get posts like these delivered right to your mailbox every week. 🗞

🌟 STAR BRIGHT: Capella for January

8 January 2022 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.

The constellation Auriga the Charioteer and its alpha star, **Capella**. The diagonal blue line represents the plane of the Milky Way, and the lower curved blue line represents the plane of the ecliptic. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

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

What astronomical observations and stellar sightings 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 (10th and 11th eds.). 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. 🌟

🦅 FRIDAY BIRD FAMILIES: Storks, Frigatebirds, Cormorants, Pelicans, & More

7 January 2022 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 (six different families) are the Storks (pages 246–247), the Frigatebirds (pages 246–247), the Boobies and Gannets (pages 248–251), the Cormorants (pages 252–255), the Darters (pages 256–257), and the Pelicans (pages 256–257), a diverse collection of large and mostly aquatic birds.

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:

STORKS — Family Ciconiidae. Large, long-legged birds that fly with slow beats of their long, broad wings, soaring and circling like hawks. Species: 19 World, 2 N.A. [North America]

FRIGATEBIRDS — Family Fregatidae. These large, dark seabirds have the longest wingspan, in proportion to their weight, of all birds. They spend much time soaring, often circling. Occasional wingflaps are slow. Wings angular, tails long and deeply forked, and bills long and hooked. Species: 5 World, 3 N.A.

BOOBIES · GANNETS — Family Sulidae. High-diving seabirds that plunge into water. Gregarious, nesting in colonies on small islands. The rest of the year, gannets roost at sea, boobies primarily on land. Mostly silent at sea. Species: 10 World, 6 N.A.

CORMORANTS — Family Phalacrocoracidae. Dark birds with set-back legs; long, hooked bill; and colorful bare facial skin and throat pouch. Dive from the surface for fish. May briefly soar; may swim partially submerged. Mostly silent, except around nesting colonies. Species: 31 World, 6 N.A.

DARTERS — Family Anhingidae. Long, slim neck helps to distinguish anhingas from cormorants. Anhingas often swim submerged to the neck. Sharply pointed bill is used to spear fish. Species: 4 World, 1 N.A.

PELICANS — Family Pelicanidae. These large, heavy waterbirds have massive bills and huge throat pouches used as dip nets to catch fish. In flight, pelicans hold their heads drawn back. Mostly silent away from breeding colonies. Species: 8 World, 2 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 Pelican family, for example. How many species? (8 worldwide.) Are there any near us? (2 species in North America, and the individual maps will give us more detail.) What are their distinctive features? (There’s nothing quite like a pelican: large and heavy, giant bills with expandable throat pouches, fly with neck drawn in, and so on.)

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 Pelican family, why not investigate the most widespread North American species in the group: the American White Pelican (page 256).

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 American White Pelican? (62 inches long with a 108-inch wingspan!) What is its scientific name? (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos.) Will you be able to find this species where you live? 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.)

From one of our other families, pick a different species to look at — for example, the Double-crested Cormorant in the Cormorant family (page 252), a large diving and fishing bird found all across North America.

Or from the oceanic Frigatebird family, investigate the magnificent Magnificent Frigatebird (page 246).

Frigatebird males are famous for their giant inflatable throat pouches, used to attract females on the nesting grounds.

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 using 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. 🐦

❡ Vade mecum: 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. 🌎

❡ State birds: One species covered this week is a United States state bird: the Brown Pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis), the state bird of Louisiana. 🇺🇸

❡ 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. 🐦 🦉 🦆 🦃 🦅

🚀 HOMESCHOOL ASTRONOMY: Follow the Webb Telescope!

6 January 2022 by Bob O'Hara

One of the most exciting homeschool science projects you and your students can do this month is to follow the new James Webb Space Telescope as it travels out beyond the orbit of the moon to begin exploring the early universe.

The Webb Space Telescope is one of the successors to the venerable Hubble Space Telescope, which has now been in operation for more than thirty years. The Webb Telescope was launched last month on Christmas Day and is now on a 900,000 mile journey to take up its permanent station at a point in space called “L2,” where the gravitational forces balance in a way that makes it easier to keep the telescope in position. You and your students can track the telescope’s journey day by day on this wonderful webpage from NASA:

➢ Where is the Webb Telescope? (nasa.gov)

The Hubble Telescope’s mirror is about seven feet in diameter, whereas the Webb Telescope’s mirror is more than twenty feet in diameter. As it travels to its operating position, various components of the telescope will be unfolded and put into service, and you can follow all those individual deployments on the JWST webpage.

If all goes well, Webb should arrive at its permanent station in about twenty days (in late January). Its planned operating life is expected to be at least ten years, so if you start this month, you could very easily make the Webb Telescope a regular part of your homeschool science lessons for a long time to come.

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: For a great weekly astronomical essay, perfect for older homeschoolers, pay a visit to “The Sky This Week” from the U.S. Naval Observatory. These well-written pages, posted each Tuesday, usually focus on one or two special astronomical events or phenomena. If you have high school astronomy students, have them read these 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. 🔭

📸 PHOTO CHALLENGE – January 2022: “Heavy Equipment” and “Multiculturalism”

6 January 2022 by Bob O'Hara

Calling all homeschool photographers! One of the independent projects we recommend to homeschool students is the monthly Wikimedia Commons Photo Challenge. The January challenge is now open and the announced themes are “Heavy Equipment” and “Multiculturalism.” You can see sample photos and learn how to submit your own entry here:

➢ Wikimedia Commons Photo Challenge – Open Themes (updated monthly)

The Wikimedia Commons Photo Challenge encourages people to take and submit high-quality images for the public Wikimedia Commons database, the source from which Wikipedia and many other websites draw their images. Once you’ve registered and submitted an entry, you can also participate in the selection of future themes and in the voting for the monthly winners.

If you have enthusiastic young photographers in your home academy, why not encourage them to sign up and submit an entry. Working on a specific theme over a period of a few weeks is a great way for students to develop both their technical camera skills and their visual composition skills. And if you submit a number of entries over time you can assemble a personal portfolio page to show off your work — that would be good experience in how to create a professional presentation of yourself for future employment or college admissions.

You can find more ideas for independent homeschool projects in a wide range of scientific and scholarly fields on our River Houses Lunar Society page.

What photographic, artistic, and scientific discoveries have you been making in your homeschool this Orion Term? 😊

❡ Explore more: Your recommended world almanac has a long list of famous artists on pages 174–177, and that list includes famous photographers. Why not pick out a name or two to research each month, either online or on your next visit to your local library — it would be a great way to give your students a little extra photographic inspiration! 📸

❡ Follow along with us: This is one of our regular “Lunar Society” posts about the many independent projects we recommend to homeschool students. Add your name to our weekly mailing list and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🗞

🎵 🎭 TWELFTH NIGHT and the End of Holiday Music Month 2021–2022

5 January 2022 by Bob O'Hara

Today is the Twelfth Day of Christmas, which means tonight is Twelfth Night, an evening traditionally given over to disorderly irreverence. Just as rowdy Halloween (All Hallows’ Evening) precedes the Christian holy day of All Hallows (All Saints’ Day), so rowdy Twelfth Night precedes the Christian holy day of Epiphany.

Shakespeare’s slapstick-ish comedy Twelfth Night was written as entertainment for a night such as this, when the world is upside-down and a woman disguised as a man falls in love with a man who is in love with a woman who is in love with the woman disguised as a man, and when, as usual, the Fool is the only one with any sense. For homeschool entertainment this evening, why not listen again to the great countertenor Alfred Deller (1912–1979), who we featured also on New Year’s Day, singing, in true Renaissance style, the Fool’s song “When that I was and a little tiny boy” from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night:

Deller was a key figure in the twentieth-century revival of authentic early music performance, and he recreated for new audiences the popular singing styles of the Shakespearean era. For an ideal little homeschool lesson on this Twelfth Night, why not sing along and learn a verse or two of this famous Shakespearean song:

When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came to a man’s estate,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
’Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain it raineth every day.

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came, alas! to wive,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
By swaggering I could never thrive,
For the rain it raineth every day.

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
For the rain it raineth every day.

Long, long ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that’s all one, our play is done,
And we’ll strive to please you every day.

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
For the rain it raineth every day.

And in case you and your students have forgotten the plot of Twelfth Night (or never could figure it out in the first place), cartoon artist Mya Gosling has got you covered:

[Twelfth Night in three panels] — Twelfth Night in three panels. (Image: Good Tickle Brain, “the world’s foremost stick-figure Shakespeare webcomic.”)

Four weeks ago our music month begun, with hey, ho, the wind and the rain. But that’s all one, our month is done. We strive to please you every day. 🎄 🎵 🎭

❡ Who will find the beans? To properly celebrate Twelfth Night, you’ll want to be sure to bake a proper Shakespearean Twelfth Night cake, complete with three hidden beans inside. The Folger Shakespeare Library has a complete recipe for you. 🎂

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

❡ Lift every voice: This is one of our occasional posts on Homeschool Arts & Music. Add your name to our weekly mailing list and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🗞

🎵 🎄 HOLIDAY MUSIC MONTH: A Partridge in a 🍐🌳

5 January 2022 by Bob O'Hara

Our Homeschool Holiday Music Month comes to its grand conclusion today with two posts: this one for the Twelfth Day (of Christmas) and a second one for Twelfth Night.

This spectacular arrangement of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” by Broadway composer David Chase, performed live in concert by the Boston Pops Orchestra, is an educational musical masterpiece that you shouldn’t miss. Why not turn it up to orchestral volume and invite your students to dance around the house today:

January 5th is traditionally considered the last day of the Christmas season — the Twelfth Day of Christmas. In many Western societies it’s treated as a day of revelry and celebration; it’s also often regarded as the traditional day on which the Christmas tree and all the decorations come down until next year. The humorous “Twelve Days of Christmas” song, which can be traced back in part at least as far as the late 1700s, celebrates the day and has become a staple of radio broadcasts and concert hall extravaganzas across the country.

Twelve Days of Christmas stamps (2017 series) from the Isle of Man, designed by artist Catherine Rowe.

David Chase’s arrangement of the “Twelve Days of Christmas,” which incorporates passages from a great variety of other works, has become an especially popular performance piece. How many musical quotations can your students identify within it? I can hear (at least) some children’s songs, some other Christmas carols, a Beethoven symphony, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music, Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, some dance-hall cancan music, and of course Handel’s magnificent Messiah at the end. (Remember the Great Rest at the end of the Hallelujah Chorus that we pointed to last week? Did you recognize it again here?)

One of the deepest purposes of a liberal education is to enable people to get jokes, and this “Twelve Days” performance teaches that happy principle. See if your students notice how the entire audience laughs when the orchestra gets to Day 5, and see if they can tell why.

What marvelous musical discoveries did you make in your homeschool during this delightful Holiday Music Month? 🎵 🍐🌳

❡ Just how much are those French hens? Did you know you can use “The Twelve Days of Christmas” to teach economics? It’s true! The PNC Financial Services Group, a Pittsburgh-based banking firm, has for many years been publishing a whimsical Christmas Price Index that charts the total cost of all the items in the song, from twelve drummers drumming to a partridge in a pear tree. They even have a kids’ activity book and twelve daily crafts you can make — why not give them a try!

🌎 🇬🇹 WEEKLY WORLD HERITAGE: Tikal National Park in Guatemala

5 January 2022 by Bob O'Hara

Guatemala in Central America is one of our homeschool countries-of-the-week, so why not spend a few minutes today learning about one of Guatemala’s World Heritage Sites: Tikal National Park.

The north acropolis at Tikal. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

Tikal is one of the most important surviving monuments of the ancient Mayan civilization:

Tikal National Park is located in northern Guatemala’s Petén Province within a large forest region often referred to as the Maya Forest, which extends into neighbouring Mexico and Belize. Embedded within the much larger Maya Biosphere Reserve, exceeding two million hectares and contiguous with additional conservation areas, Tikal National Park is one of the few World Heritage properties inscribed according to both natural and cultural criteria for its extraordinary biodiversity and archaeological importance. It comprises 57,600 hectares of wetlands, savannah, tropical broadleaf and palm forests with thousands of architectural and artistic remains of the Mayan civilization from the Preclassic Period (600 B.C.) to the decline and eventual collapse of the urban centre around 900 A.D. The diverse ecosystems and habitats harbour a wide spectrum of neotropical fauna and flora. Five cats, including Jaguar and Puma, several species of monkeys and anteaters and more than 300 species of birds are among the notable wildlife. The forests comprise more than 200 tree species and over 2000 higher plants have been recorded across the diverse habitats.

Tikal, a major Pre-Columbian political, economic and military centre, is one of the most important archaeological complexes left by the Maya civilization. An inner urban zone of around 400 hectares contains the principal monumental architecture and monuments which include palaces, temples, ceremonial platforms, small and medium sized residences, ball-game courts, terraces, roads, large and small squares. Many of the existing monuments preserve decorated surfaces, including stone carvings and mural paintings with hieroglyphic inscriptions, which illustrate the dynastic history of the city and its relationships with urban centres as far away as Teotihuacan and Calakmul in Mexico, Copan in Honduras or Caracol in Belize. A wider zone of key archaeological importance, around 1,200 hectares, covers residential areas and historic water reservoirs, today known as “aguadas.” The extensive peripheral zone features more than 25 associated secondary sites, historically serving protective purposes and as check-points for trade routes. The peripheral areas also played a major role for agricultural production for the densely populated centre.

Research has revealed numerous constructions, carved monuments and other evidence bearing witness to highly sophisticated technical, intellectual and artistic achievements that developed from the arrival of the first settlers (800 B.C.) to the last stages of historic occupation around the year 900. Tikal has enhanced our understanding not only of an extraordinary bygone civilisation but also of cultural evolution more broadly. The diversity and quality of architectonical and sculptural ensembles serving ceremonial, administrative and residential functions are exemplified in a number of exceptional places, such as the Great Plaza, the Lost World Complex, the Twin Pyramid Complexes, as well as in ball courts and irrigation structures. (World Heritage Centre #64)

You can find a gallery of additional photos of Tikal National Park 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 of World Heritage Sites online at the 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 are you 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. 🌎 🌍 🌏

📚 LEARNING THE LIBRARY: The Social 300s

4 January 2022 by Bob O'Hara

Tuesday is our usual Homeschool Books & Libraries Day in the River Houses, and on the first Tuesday of each month we invite you and your young scholars to explore one of the major Dewey Decimal classes at your local library. If you start at the beginning of the River Houses year in September and run until July, you can adopt one major class each month and survey the whole of knowledge (!) in a year.

The class for January is the 300s, which covers the Social Sciences. (The Dewey system is grouped into hundreds, so “the 300s” means the numbers running from 300 to 399.)

Here’s what you’ll find at your local library in the Social 300s:

CLASS 300 – SOCIAL SCIENCES
- 300 – Social Sciences (General), Sociology, & Anthropology
- 310 – Statistics
- 320 – Political Science
- 330 – Economics
- 340 – Law
- 350 – Public Administration & Military Science
- 360 – Social Problems & Social Services
- 370 – Education
- 380 – Commerce, Communications, & Transportation
- 390 – Customs, Etiquette, & Folklore

Each of these “tens” divisions is subdivided further of course. For example, in the 340s (Law) you’ll find works on Constitutional Law (342), Criminal Law (345), Courts and Procedures (347), and so on.

So this month if you’ve got a future anthropologist in your homeschool, 301 is the place to go. A future insurance agent? Head for 368. A future cavalry officer? Try 357. A future senator? Go and explore 328. A successor to Miss Manners? Then 395 is the place to be. 😊

❡ What’s our number, mom? The Social 300s includes Education (370), and so that means it also includes homeschooling! If you want to see if your local library has any books specifically on the topic of homeschooling (not simply books that homeschoolers might use), make your way to the 300s (Social Sciences), and then to the 370s (Education), and then to 371 (Schools and Their Activities; Special Education), and then to 371.04 (Alternative Schools, including home schools). 🔍

When you’re learning the library with your students, be sure they understand that any library collection that uses the Dewey Decimal Classification will be arranged in the same way: the numbers run from 000 to 999 in every Dewey-based library, so if you’re interested in, say, Astronomy, you’ll find it in the 520s in both the small-town library near you and in the big-city library across the country. If you have an opportunity to make field trips to multiple libraries over the course of the year you’ll be able to demonstrate that in practice and get your students accustomed to orienting themselves by reading the numbers aloud as you walk together down the ranges: “500 … 510 … 515 … here it is, 520.”

Mastering these library basics will help your students become independent life-long learners and will ensure that they’ll feel right at home in any library they visit.

What delightful decimals and textual treasures have you discovered in your library this Orion Term? 📚

❡ Make it a tradition: Why not spend a few minutes during your first library visit each month and devise a little Dewey tradition of your own. Read the title page of one book in the 300s, one in the 310s, one in the 320s, one in the 330s, and so on. Find the very first book in the class (the lowest 300) and the very last book in the class (the highest 399). Find the thinnest book and the thickest book in each class. Make a list of your three favorite numbers in each class. If you follow a simple pattern like this month-by-month, over the course of the year you’ll be surprised how much information your students will absorb and how many academic skills they will develop without even realizing it. 🔍

❡ Dukedoms large enough: Have you found all the local libraries in your area? There may be more than you realize, and there’s no better homeschool field trip than a field trip to a new library! The WorldCat Library Finder will help you find all the library collections near you — public and private, large and small — and the WorldCat catalog itself will help you locate the closest copy of almost any book in the world. 📖

❡ When in doubt, go to the library: This is one of our regular Homeschool Books & Libraries posts. Add your name to our weekly mailing list and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🗞

🎵 🌟 HOLIDAY MUSIC MONTH: Star in the East

3 January 2022 by Bob O'Hara

Take a few minutes this New Year’s week to introduce your students to the shape-note tradition in early American music with this beautiful performance of the old shape-note carol “Star in the East,” arranged for voices and handbells by William Allen Pasch (b. 1948):

We’re coming to the end of our Homeschool Holiday Music Month in the River Houses — it began on the first of December and will conclude this Tuesday on Twelfth Night. Throughout the month we’ve been sharing an assortment of seasonal favorites in a great variety of styles and genres — classical and modern, sacred and secular, serious and silly — along with a collection of easy educational notes to help you teach little musical lessons all along the way.

The words to “Star in the East” (also known as “Brightest and Best”) were written by the Anglican bishop and hymn-writer Reginald Heber (1783–1826), and they tell the story of the Star of Bethlehem, an element of the Christian Nativity story that all young homescholars, whether religious or secular, should learn to recognize. Heber’s words have been paired with a number of different tunes over the last two centuries, but the best known of these by far is the anonymous American melody heard above, first published in the famous Southern Harmony collection of 1835. The tunes in Southern Harmony were popular across the country in the nineteenth century, but many fell out of fashion in later decades. They have since undergone a great revival in popularity, and many professional and amateur singing groups in the United States and around the world now include them in their repertoires.

Southern Harmony was one of many early American song-books that printed its music using shape notes, a system of notation that makes it easier for non-musicians to learn a tune. Instead of the standard oval note shape used in conventional music printing today, shape-note song-books use squares, triangles, and diamonds, as well as ovals, to represent the different pitches on the musical scale.

Because of the popularity of Southern Harmony and related early song-books, including the very popular Sacred Harp collection of 1844, the type of choral music that these works contain has come to be generally known as “shape-note music,” even though properly speaking that term refers to the system of notation rather than the musical style.

Here’s another grand foot-stomping performance of “Star in the East,” by the Minnesota vocal group The Rose Ensemble:

If you’d like to learn more about the modern and very lively American shape-note singing community, pay a visit to the appropriately named fasola.org website, sponsored by the Sacred Harp Musical Heritage Association.

What marvelous musical discoveries have you been making in your homeschool during this delightful Holiday Music Month? 🎄 🎵

❡ Musical memories: If you’d like to fill your homeschool with some beautiful background sounds during the holidays, why not tune in to the 24-hour Holiday Channel from WQXR, the famous classical music radio station in New York City. “Enjoy the sounds of orchestras, choirs, brass ensembles and more as we celebrate the sacred and secular sounds of the season.” I have it on as background music almost all day at this time of year. Won’t you join me? 📻

❡ Olden times and ancient rhymes: What did the Christmas season sound like a hundred years ago and more? Find out from this wonderful collection of historic recordings of American Christmas music, brought together by the Library of Congress. 🎄

January 2022
S	M	T	W	T	F	S
« Dec
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30	31