The River Houses

A National Network of Local Homeschool Societies

🔭 WATCHERS OF THE SKIES – April 2021

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On the first Saturday of every month we post educational skywatching notes for the homeschool month ahead. Here’s the monthly northern hemisphere night-sky review for April 2021 from the Hubble Space Telescope’s website — it features April constellations, including our term-namesake Leo the Lion:

And here’s another April night-sky review, courtesy of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California — it also features Leo, as well as some special secrets about sunsets:

One of the easiest astronomical exercises you and your students can do each month is print out your own free copy of the current two-page Evening Sky Map and monthly sky calendar available from skymaps.com:

Each map includes a constellation chart for the month as well as a schedule of upcoming astronomical events and an astronomical glossary. (Monthly maps for the southern hemisphere and the equatorial regions are also available.)

The best stargazing nights in April will be toward the middle of the month: the moon will be new (and the sky darkest) on the 11th. As always, you can look up the moon’s phases in your River Houses almanac and also on the timeanddate.com website. 🌑🌓🌕🌗🌑

April is the middle month of Leo Term, our spring term in the River Houses, as noted above. Our Great Star for the month of April is, naturally enough, Regulus (alpha Leonis), Leo’s heart, which we’ll be writing about next week. Print your own River Houses Star Calendar and follow along with us through the year as we learn about twelve of the high lights of the northern hemisphere night sky. 🌟

What celestial observations will you and your students be making in your homeschool this April? 😊

❡ All the star-sown sky: Teaching your students to recognize the constellations 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. ✨

❡ 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 science students, have them read these pages aloud to you each week, or ask them to study them and narrate a summary back to you. 🌌

❡ Make friendship with the stars: 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. 🔭

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📸 PHOTO CHALLENGE – April 2021: “Fossils” and “Angles and Squares”

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

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.

A sample entry for the theme “Fossils” from this month’s Wikimedia Commons Photo Challenge. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

If you have talented 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.

A sample entry for the theme “Angles and Squares” from this month’s Wikimedia Commons Photo Challenge. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

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 Leo Term? 😊

❡ Explore more: Your recommended world almanac has a long list of famous artists on pages 214–217, 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. 🗞

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🦅 FRIDAY BIRD FAMILIES: Larks and Swallows

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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 Larks (pages 374–377) and the Swallows (pages 376–381).

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:

LARKS — Family Alaudidae. Old World family represented by many species, especially from Africa. Horned Lark (known as Shore Lark in the Old World) is the only native species in the New World, although Eurasian Skylark strays to AK and is established as an introduced species on Vancouver Island, BC. Ground dwellers of open fields, larks are seed- and insect-eaters. They seldom alight on trees or bushes. On the ground, they walk rather than hop. Species: 93 World, 2 N.A. [North America]

SWALLOWS — Family Hirundinidae. Slender bodies with long, pointed wings resemble Swifts, but “wrist” angle is sharper and farther from the body; flight is more fluid. Adept aerialists, swallows dart to catch flying insects. Flocks perch in long rows on branches and wires. Species: 84 World, 15 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 Larks, for example. How many species? (93 worldwide.) Are there any near us? (Really only on species in North America, with a second mainly Eurasian species that sometimes occurs in Alaska.) What are their distinctive features? (Ground-dwellers, walk rather than hop, varied diet, 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 Lark family, why not investigate one of the most widespread birds in North America, the Horned Lark (page 374).

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 Horned Lark? (6¾–7¾ inches long.) What is its scientific name? (Eremophila alpestris.) 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.)

Horned Larks are open-country birds that favor fields and farmlands. They occur all across North America but are not necessarily common in all areas. In winter they often forage in large flocks. The “horns” of the Horned Lark (like those of the Great Horned Owl) are feather tufts that stick up on either side of the head. As the illustrations in the guide show, Horned Larks are unusually variable, with many different subspecies (geographical races) described from different parts of the continent.

The Horned Lark is really the only North American species in the Lark family, but since the Eurasian Skylark occasionally strays into western Alaska it’s included in your guide as well — and that’s good, because it gives us an excuse to play its flight-song. The Horned Lark is not especially melodious, but the Skylark has been featured in art and literature for centuries, and it’s easy to see (or hear) why.

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. For example, in this week’s other family, the Swallows, take a look at the friendly Barn Swallow (page 378), another widespread North American species, but one that is highly migrátory and only present in the United States in spring, summer, and fall.

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 Leo 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. 🐦

❡ 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. 🌎

❡ 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. 🐦 🦉 🦆 🦃 🦅

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🍝 CELEBRATING the Annual Spaghetti Harvest in Ticino, Switzerland

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Although most people tend to think of spaghetti as an Italian dish, some of the world’s finest spaghetti is actually grown just across the border in the mountainous cantons of Switzerland. The annual Swiss spaghetti harvest is getting underway this week, and it’s a wonderful cultural tradition that all homeschoolers should know about. Here’s a classic two-minute documentary produced by the BBC:

Sadly, many of these traditional farming practices have declined in recent years under the pressure of modernization, but artisanal spaghetti growers are still keeping them alive, sometimes with subsidies from the Swiss government. 🇨🇭

Some of the world’s finest spaghetti is grown in the mountain valleys of the Canton of Ticino in Switzerland. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

You can find a beautiful map of the alpine nation of Switzerland on plate 69 in your River Houses atlas, and you can learn more about the annual Ticino spaghetti harvest on the helpful website of the Swiss Board of Tourism.

What ancient and honorable cultural traditions are you celebrating in your homeschool this Leo Term? 😉

❡ Stay in the loop: This is one of our occasional Homeschool Holidays & Anniversaries posts. Add your name to our free weekly mailing list and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🗞

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🖋 ☔️ WONDERFUL WORDS: “Whan that Aprill…”

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April showers are expected today here in New England, so it’s only natural that our homeschool poem-of-the-week for this first week of April should be the opening lines of the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343–1400), one of the foundational texts of the English language and a staple of high school and college literature classes across the English-speaking world.

I can still recite these lines myself from high school — perhaps you can too, and you can pass that tradition on to your students this month. Here’s a quintessential “random Internet dude” giving us a Chaucer reading from his own memory of freshman English in college:

The Canterbury Tales are a collection of stories told by a group of travelers on their way to Canterbury Cathedral in southeastern England to commemorate the life and martyrdom of Archbishop Thomas Becket. They were written about the year 1390, more than 200 years after Becket’s murder, and they are in Middle English. It’s conventional to divide the history of our language into three phases: Old English (Anglo-Saxon), Middle English (Chaucer, for example), and Modern English (Shakespeare to today). (That’s a great simplification of a vast subject, of course.) Old English is, to modern eyes and ears, a foreign language. But Middle English, although quite strange, is recognizably English, and with a little effort and help it can usually be worked out.

Here’s this week’s Chaucer passage in straight Middle English:

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages),
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

And here’s an interlinear translation. (That’s a good concept to teach!) Invite your students to compare Middle and Modern carefully and see how they are alike and different:

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
 When April with its sweet-smelling showers
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
 Has pierced the drought of March to the root,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
 And bathed every vein [of the plants] in such liquid
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
 By which power the flower is created;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
 When the West Wind also with its sweet breath,
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
 In every wood and field has breathed life into
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
 The tender new leaves, and the young sun
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
 Has run half its course in [the constellation] Aries,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
 And small fowls make melody,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
 Those that sleep all the night with open eyes
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages),
 (So Nature incites them in their hearts),
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
 Then folk long to go on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
 And professional pilgrims to seek foreign shores,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
 To distant shrines, known in various lands;
And specially from every shires ende
 And specially from every shire’s end
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
 Of England to Canterbury they travel,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
 To seek the holy blessed martyr,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
 Who helped them when they were sick.

It would be hard to overestimate the importance of Chaucer in the history of English literature. In fact, the first book printed in England in the English language was William Caxton’s 1476 edition of The Canterbury Tales. Why not drop Chaucer’s name this April in your homeschool and invite your students to learn more about his works, his life and times, and about the history of our language.

What literary discoveries — ancient or modern — have you made in your homeschool this Leo Term? 😊

❡ Explore more: For a quick review of the Medieval period, turn to pages 188–197 in your River Houses history encyclopedia. You’ll even find a little picture of Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims right there on page 196. 📚

❡ From every shire’s end: 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. Tolkien fans will perhaps pluck out this little phrase — “from every shires ende” is Chaucer’s Middle-English equivalent of something like “from sea to shining sea.” 😊

❡ Literary lives: The website of the Poetry Foundation includes biographical notes and examples of the work of many important poets (including Geoffrey Chaucer) 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. 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. 📖

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🗓 ☔️ 🌸 HAPPY HOMESCHOOL APRIL from the River Houses!

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Happy April to all our homeschool readers and friends! Here are some educational ideas, events, and activities to look for in the homeschool month ahead. 🔍

Third-century Roman mosaic from Tunisia. (Image: Ad Meskens/Wikimedia Commons.)
April with 30 days is the second month of Leo Term, our spring term in the River Houses. Leo Term runs from March through May. Visit our homeschool calendar page and print out some of our simple educational calendars and planners — they’ll help you create a light and easy structure for your homeschool year. 🗓

The month of April (Latin mensis Aprilis) was the second month of the year in the earliest Roman calendars, which treated the beginning of spring in March as the beginning of the new year. The origin of the month’s name is disputed, and it may be lost forever in the mists of time. Some have connected it to the Latin verb aperire (to open), while others associate it with variant name-forms of the goddess Aphrodite, but there is no sure consensus. Just as the Romans renamed their original fifth month Julius (July, after Julius Caesar) and their original sixth month Augustus (August, after Augustus Caesar), so did they briefly rename April Neronius after the emperor Nero — but following Nero’s disastrous reign and subsequent suicide, that short-lived change was reversed. You can learn more about different kinds of modern and historical calendars on pages 387–393 in your River Houses almanac. 📚

Frostiana:

You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.

Our Sunday states-of-the-week for April will be California, Minnesota, Oregon, and Kansas, and our countries will run from Myanmar to Papua New Guinea. Print your own River Houses States & Countries Calendar and tour the United States and the whole world with us from Delaware to Hawaii and Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. 🇺🇸 🌎

We’ll be visiting World Heritage Sites in Myanmar, the Netherlands, Nigeria, and Palau this month — our River Houses World Heritage Calendar will point the way. 🗺

We’ll have homeschool poems this month from Geoffrey Chaucer (for April showers), Delmore Schwartz (for April days), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (for Paul Revere), Ralph Waldo Emerson (for the embattled farmers), and A.E. Housman (for the loveliest of trees). Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and join us as we visit with fifty of our favorite friends over the course of the year. ✒️

Our Friday Bird Families this month will include the Larks and Swallows; the Chickadees, Titmice, Penduline Tits, Verdins, Long-tailed Tits, and Bushtits; the Nuthatches, Creepers, and Wrens; the Gnatcatchers, Dippers, and Kinglets; and the Sylviid Warblers, Leaf Warblers, Grasshopper-Warblers, and Old World Flycatchers and Chats. (So many wonderful names, yes?) Print your own copy of our River Houses Calendar of American Birds, get out your copy of our recommended homeschool bird guide, and follow the flyways with us. 🦅

Our monthly Great Star for April is Regulus (alpha Leonis), which we’ll be writing about next week. Print your own River Houses Star Calendar and join us as we visit twelve high lights of the northern hemisphere night sky and make them friends for life. 🌟

Our Dewey Decimal class for April is the Technological 600s — follow along with us (on the first Tuesday of each month) and help your students learn the whole library over the course of the year! 📚

And watch for our monthly Wikimedia Commons Photo Challenge post, coming up in the next few days — it’s a great opportunity for all homeschool photographers. 📸

Also coming up this month:

 ⬩ 1 April (Th): Annual Swiss Spaghetti Harvest 🍝
 ⬩ 15 April (Th): Leonardo da Vinci’s Birthday, 1452 🎨
 ⬩ 19 April (M): Lexington & Concord, 1775 🇺🇸
 ⬩ 23 April (F): William Shakespeare’s Birthday (more or less), 1564 🎭
 ⬩ 26 April (M): Lunar Society Report 🌕
 ⬩ 30 April (F): National Arbor Day 🌳

And remember that while you’re sleeping, or awake, or indoors, or out, “spring advances up the United States at the average rate of about fifteen miles a day. It ascends mountainsides at the rate of about a hundred feet a day. It sweeps ahead like a flood of water, racing down the long valleys, creeping up hillsides in a rising tide. Most of us, like the man who lives on the bank of a river and watches the stream flow by, see only one phase of the movement of spring. Each year the season advances toward us out of the south, sweeps around us, goes flooding away to the north.” 🌸

What calendrical events will you be marking in your homeschool this April? 😊

❡ Thirty days hath September: This is one of our regular Homeschool Terms & Calendars posts. 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. 🗞

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🌍 🇲🇪 WEEKLY WORLD HERITAGE: Durmitor National Park in Montenegro

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Montenegro in southeastern Europe is one of our homeschool countries-of-the-week, so why not spend a few minutes today learning about one of Montenegro’s World Heritage Sites: Durmitor National Park.

Durmitor National Park in the alpine region of Montenegro. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

The Alps, one of the world’s most celebrated mountain ranges, stretches all the way across southern Europe from France in the west to Montenegro in the east:

Durmitor is a stunning limestone massif located in Northern Montenegro and belonging to the Dinaric Alps or Dinarides. It is also the name of Montenegro’s largest protected area, the Durmitor National Park, which constitutes the heart of a landscape shaped by glaciers, numerous rivers and underground streams, all of which are embedded in the much larger Tara River Basin Biosphere Reserve. Some fifty peaks higher than 2,000 metres above sea level rise above plateaus, alpine meadows and forests, including Bobotov Peak (2,525 metres above sea level). Numerous glacial lakes, locally known as “mountain eyes,” cover the landscape. Despite its many attractions, Durmitor is best known for the spectacular canyons of the Draga, Sušica, Komarnica and Tara Rivers; the latter stands out as Europe’s deepest gorge. Durmitor is a popular tourism destination, known for superb hiking, climbing, mountaineering and canoeing opportunities. The nearby town of Zabljak is Montenegro’s primary ski resort.

Besides the extraordinary landscape beauty and the fascinating geological heritage, Durmitor National Park is also home to an impressive biological diversity. At the habitat level, a rare old-growth stand of European Black Pine deserves to be mentioned. Favored by the altitudinal gradient of more than 2,000 metres and both alpine and Mediterranean climatic influences, there are more than 1,600 vascular plants in the wider Durmitor Massif. A great percentage are found in the park and many are rare and endemic species. Large mammals include Brown Bear, Grey Wolf, and European Wild Cat. Among the 130 recorded birds are Golden Eagle, Peregrine Falcon and Capercaillie. Likewise noteworthy is the rich fish fauna, which includes the endangered Danube Salmon. The park is inhabited by farmers and shepherds, traditionally using the high-altitude meadows as summer pastures. The property is well protected and its status and international recognition have helped to prevent irreparable damage from threats, such as upstream pollution and proposed dam construction. (UNESCO World Heritage Centre #100)

The Tara River Gorge is one of the most beautiful montane landscapes within Durmitor National Park.

The Tara River Gorge in Durmitor National Park, Montenegro. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

You can find a gallery of additional photos of Durmitor 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 Leo 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. 🌍

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🌕 RESEARCH PROJECTS for Homeschool Students – March 2021

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There’s a full moon tonight, so that means it’s time for a report from the Lunar Society of the River Houses.

The Lunar Society is one of our big and wonderful long-term plans to encourage homeschoolers to participate in real online research projects and to share their results with other homeschool families.

Here’s our list of just some of the great projects that homeschool students (and their parents!) can join and contribute to, from history to geography to physics to natural history to mathematics to meteorology to literature to galactic exploration:

Browse through that project list and find one or two that would be a good fit for your family and a good match for your interests. Before you know it, your students will be learning a host of valuable skills and your little home academy will be well on its way to becoming an international research powerhouse. 🔬 🔭 🖥 🦋 🔍 ⚗️ ⛏ 📖 🌲 😊

Over time, it’s my hope that these monthly reports about the Lunar Society will evolve into something like a forum where homeschoolers participating in online research can share their accomplishments.

As a simple example, here’s my own personal report for the past lunar month on the two types of projects I participate in: eBird monitoring of bird populations, and distributed computing research using the Berkeley open infrastructure application. You and your students can participate right now in these projects, and in many others too.

On the eBird website (eBird.org), sponsored by Cornell University, I have been documenting a new site, a local college campus that I frequently visit. So far I’ve contributed a total of 148 checklists (observation reports) for this locality — it’s a site that has never been documented before. As more checklists are added, and as eBird combines them and charts them automatically, you’ll be able to get a real sense of seasonal distribution and migration patterns at this location. Here’s a snippet of what that looks like as it’s developing, with reports since last September:

And here’s a recent sample checklist so you can see what they look like:

You can start keeping a similar eBird list for a location near you — your backyard, or a local park or other natural area. (Helping to track a public park or eBird “hotspot” will let you generate more useful results.) You can even add photos and sound recordings to your reports if you wish. Just pay a visit to the eBird website and start exploring.

Distributed computing projects use idle time on your computer to perform scientific calculations on various kinds of complex data. The most popular distributed computing projects run on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing platform (BOINC), and I contribute computer time (whenever my laptop is plugged in) to three of these: (1) the Einstein@Home project, which studies neutron stars; (2) the MilkyWay@Home project, which studies the history and structure of our galaxy; and (3) the Asteroids@Home project, which calculates the shapes and orbits of poorly-known asteroids. (Yes, those are projects you and your students can really contribute to.)

I’ve created River Houses team pages for each of these projects (Einstein@Home team, MilkyWay@Home team, Asteroids@Home team). Once your computer is signed up to participate you can join one of these teams and you can also print “certificates of computation” that show how much data you’ve individually processed and how much your team has processed — they’re just the thing for your homeschool bulletin board. (And while it’s running, Einstein@Home has a cool screensaver that shows you in real time what your computer is analyzing.) 📡

And here’s another level of skill development for your high school (or even advanced middle school) students: once you’ve processed a few weeks or months of data, you can start graphing your contributions. I’ve set up a simple chart of River Houses team results using an online spreadsheet, and this is what it looks like:

That’s just a simple graphing exercise — nothing particularly profound. It’s something that can be refined, developed, and expanded in the future. (And your students can develop their own individual charts as well.)

The Internet provides exceptional opportunities for homeschool students to participate in real research projects in many different scientific and scholarly fields, something that would have been impossible only a few years ago. The examples above are just a few that happen to interest me — pay a visit to our Lunar Society page to read about many more projects in a great variety of areas that you and your family can join.

What scholarly and scientific explorations have you been making in your homeschool this Leo Term? 😊

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

❡ Calling all photographers: If you’ve got a budding photographer in your homeschool, one group project you can participate in is the Wikimedia Commons Photo Challenge. A different theme is chosen each month; just sign up and follow the instructions to submit your own entries. Once you’re a registered participant you can also vote for each month’s winners. 📸

❡ Books in the running brooks: If you decide to participate in eBird, our recommended homeschool reference library includes an excellent bird guide that would serve your family well. And for any astronomical projects you may join, our recommended backyard night-sky guide and world atlas (which has an astronomical section) will help you orient yourself to the objects you are studying in the starry vault above. 🦉 🌠

❡ Whether they work together or apart: This is one of our regular Lunar Society Bulletins about the many cooperative research projects that we recommend to homeschool students. Add your name to our free weekly mailing list and get more great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🗞

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🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 28 March 2021

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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 Wisconsin, and our COUNTRIES are Mongolia 🇲🇳, Montenegro 🇲🇪, Morocco 🇲🇦, and Mozambique 🇲🇿. (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 full — a good time to be out and about in the well-lit night! 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 (28 March 2021) — Today is the 87th day of 2021; there are 278 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. 📚 The great Italian Renaissance painter and architect Raphael was born on this day in 1483. 🎨 And, there’s a full moon tonight, so that means we’ll have a report on student research opportunities from the River Houses Lunar Society. 🌕

Monday (29 March 2021) — Today is the birthday of two unrelated Waltons: the English composer William Walton (1902–1983) and the American businessman Sam Walton (1918–1992), the founder of Walmart. 🎼 🛒

Tuesday (30 March 2021) — On this day in 1867, the United States purchased Alaska from the Russian Empire for about two cents an acre. 🏔

Wednesday (31 March 2021) — The great French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes was born on this day in 1596. 📈 And on this day in 1774, Great Britain ordered the closure of the major trading port of Boston, escalating the tensions that would eventually lead to the American Revolution. 🇬🇧⚔️🇺🇸 Our Wednesday tour of World Heritage Sites this week will take you to Durmitor National Park in Montenegro 🇲🇪.

Thursday (1 April 2021) — Today is the birthday of the great seventeenth century physician William Harvey (1578–1657), who first described the circulation of the blood in the human body. ❤️ It’s also the traditional date of the annual spaghetti harvest in Ticino, Switzerland. 🍝 Our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the first week of April is the Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which opens with April showers. ☔️ Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us throughout the year. 🖋

Friday (2 April 2021) — The United States Mint was established on this day in 1792. 💰 And today is also the birthday of the Danish novelist and children’s author Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875), which means that it’s International Children’s Book Day too! 📚 Our Friday Bird Families post this week will introduce you to the Larks and the Swallows. Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦅

Saturday (3 April 2021) — Today is the birthday of the great English poet George Herbert (1593–1633). 🖋 It’s also the birthday of the American naturalist and author John Burroughs (1837–1921). 🏞 And since this is the first Saturday of the month, we’ll post our regular monthly preview today of some of the astronomical events you and your students can watch for over the next few weeks. 🔭

Sunday (4 April 2021) — Today is the birthday of the American Quaker artist Edward Hicks (1780–1849), famous for his “Peaceable Kingdom.” 🎨

🥂 🍝 OUR WEEKLY TOAST is the traditional toast offered each year at the Spaghetti Harvest Festival in Ticino, Switzerland (where they speak Italian): “Buon appetito!”

❡ 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!”). What will you toast this week? 🥂

🌍 🇲🇪 EVERYTHING FLOWS: Montenegro in eastern Europe is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Morača River, one of the principal rivers of Montenegro. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Morača River entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

The Morača River near Podgorica, Montenegro. (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. 🗓

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🌎 🇺🇸 SUNDAY STATES: Wisconsin, Mongolia, Mozambique, and More

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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:

  • 🇺🇸
    Wisconsin State Flag
    WISCONSIN (the 30th state, 29 May 1848) — The Badger State. Capital: Madison. Wisconsin can be found on page 596 in your almanac and on plates 41 and 142 in your atlas. Name origin: “Indian name, spelled Ouisconsin or Mesconsing by early chroniclers, believed to mean ‘grassy place’ in Chippewa. Congress made it Wisconsin” (almanac page 459). State bird: American Robin (bird guide page 414). Website: wisconsin.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:

  • 🇲🇳 MONGOLIA in central Asia. Population: 3,168,026. Capital: Ulaanbaatar. Government: Semi-presidential republic. Website: president.mn (in Mongolian and English).
  • 🇲🇪 MONTENEGRO in southeastern Europe. Population: 609,859. Capital: Podgorica. Government: Parliamentary republic. Website: www.gov.me (in Bosnian, Serbian, and English).
  • 🇲🇦 MOROCCO in northwestern Africa. Population: 35,561,654. Capital: Rabat. Government: Parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Website: www.maroc.ma (in Arabic, English, and several other languages).
  • 🇲🇿 MOZAMBIQUE in southeastern Africa. Population: 30,098,197. Capital: Maputo. Government: Presidential republic. Website: www.portaldogoverno.gov.mz (in Portuguese).

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 Leo 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. 🇺🇸 🌎

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