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🦅 FRIDAY BIRD FAMILIES: Storks, Frigatebirds, Gannets, Cormorants, Darters, and Pelicans

8 January 2021 by Bob O'Hara

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 Pelicans, 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 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 on the free eBird website sponsored by Cornell University. It’s a great way to learn more about what’s in your local area and about how bird populations change from season to season. 🐦

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

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

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

❡ 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. 🐦 🦉 🦆 🦃 🦅

Filed Under: Friday Bird Families, Homeschool Natural History

🌍 🇬🇳 WEEKLY WORLD HERITAGE: The Mount Nimba Nature Reserve in Guinea

6 January 2021 by Bob O'Hara

Guinea in western Africa is one of our homeschool countries-of-the-week, so why not spend a few minutes today learning about one of Guinea’s World Heritage Sites: the Mount Nimba Strict Nature Reserve.

Landscape of Mount Nimba. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

The Mount Nimba Strict Nature Reserve occupies the border between Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire to the south:

A veritable “water tower” with about fifty springs between Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea, the Mount Nimba Strict Nature Reserve is dominated by a chain of mountains that culminate at 1,752 m altitude at Mount Nimba. The slopes, covered with dense forest at the lower levels, with grassy mountain pastures, overflow with particularly rich endemic flora and fauna. Extending over a total of area of 17,540 ha, with 12,540 ha in Guinea and 5,000 ha in Côte d’Ivoire, the property is integrated into the public domain of the two States.

This Reserve contains original and diverse species of the most remarkable animal and plant populations, not only in West Africa, but also in the entire African continent; notably threatened species such as the Micropotamogale of Mount Nimba (Micropotamogale lamottei), the viviparous toad of Mount Nimba (Nimbaphrynoides occidentalis), and chimpanzees that use stones as tools. (UNESCO World Heritage Centre #155)

The unusual Mount Nimba toad Nimbaphrynoides does not lay eggs that develop into tadpoles; the species instead has internal fertilization and the eggs develop within the female, emerging as tiny developed toadlets.

A gestating female of the viviparous toad of Mount Nimba. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

You can find a gallery of additional photos of the Mount Nimba Nature Reserve on the World Heritage Centre’s website.

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

The World Heritage Centre also has a free and comprehensive World Heritage education kit for teachers, as well as a wonderful full-color wall map of World Heritage Sites (riverhouses.org/2020-wh-map), 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 (riverhouses.org/books) 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 (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us as we tour the planet, and add your name to our weekly mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🌍

Filed Under: Homeschool States & Countries, Weekly World Heritage

🎵 🎭 HAPPY TWELFTH NIGHT!

5 January 2021 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, the month is done. We strive to please you every day. 🎄 🎵 🎭

❡ 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 (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🗞

Filed Under: Holiday Music Month, Homeschool Arts & Music, Homeschool Holidays & Anniversaries

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

5 January 2021 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 in part at least as far back 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 you and 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!

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

Filed Under: Holiday Music Month, Homeschool Arts & Music

📚 LEARNING THE LIBRARY: The Social 300s

5 January 2021 by Bob O'Hara

Tuesday is our regular 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. 😊

❡ Dewey Detectives at home: If you’re still locked out of your local library because of the current pestilence, why not become a Dewey Detective at home! There may actually be Dewey decimal numbers hidden all around your house right now. Here are some tips on how to find them. 📖

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 will you be searching for 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 (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 📚

Filed Under: Discovering Dewey, Homeschool Books & Libraries

🏡 WELCOME! (Pinned Post)

5 January 2021 by Bob O'Hara

First time visitor? We post a wide range of easy-to-use educational ideas and “little lessons” that will enrich your homeschooling schedule all through the year. Please add your name to our free mailing list! (Just one message a week, and no spam.) 😊

There’s a wealth of wonderful material here on our website — everything from homeschool astronomy to books and libraries to language and literature to geography, natural history, homeschool calendars, and more. The materials we’re developing are going to become the foundation for a new type of homeschool network made up of friendly local groups called “houses” (just like in Harry Potter). Make yourself at home! 😊

Filed Under: Gauging Stations

🎵 🌟 HOLIDAY MUSIC MONTH: Star in the East

4 January 2021 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 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. Won’t you join me? 📻

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

Filed Under: Holiday Music Month, Homeschool Arts & Music

📸 PHOTO CHALLENGE – January 2021: “Umbrellas” and “Darkness”

4 January 2021 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 “Umbrellas” and “Darkness.” You can see sample photos and learn how to submit an 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 most of the images in Wikipedia are drawn. 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 “Umbrellas” 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 build up 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 “Darkness” 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 (riverhouses.org/lunar).

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

❡ Explore more: Your recommended world almanac (riverhouses.org/books) has a long list of famous artists on pages 177–180, 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 (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🗞

Filed Under: Lunar Society Bulletins, Photo Challenges

🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 3 January 2020 2021!

3 January 2021 by Bob O'Hara

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

🎵 🎄 🎅 OUR HOLIDAY MUSIC MONTH is approaching its close. For the past four weeks we have been sharing an assortment of seasonal favorites — 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. Our grand finale will be on the Twelfth Day of Christmas (January 5th), and I bet you can guess what it will be. 🍐🌳

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Louisiana, and our COUNTRIES are Guatemala 🇬🇹, Guinea 🇬🇳, Guinea-Bissau 🇬🇼, and Guyana 🇬🇾. (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 gibbous and waning — a good time for moon watching! 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 (3 January 2021) — Today is the 3rd day of 2021; there are 362 days remaining in this common year. Learn more about different kinds of modern and historical calendars on pages 387–393 in your (brand new 2021!) River Houses almanac (riverhouses.org/books). 📚 Today is the birthday of the great Roman orator and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.). 🏛 It’s also the birthday of English writer J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973), author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. 🌋

Monday (4 January 2021) — Today is the birthday of French educator Louis Braille (1809–1852), the inventor of the famous tactile writing system for the blind. ⠗⠓ It’s also the birthday of the original James Bond. 🐦

Tuesday (5 January 2021) — Today is the Twelfth Day of Christmas and tonight is Twelfth Night, and that means it’s the end of our Holiday Music Month — and you know what song we’ll be going out with. 🍐🌳 😊 And since this is the first Tuesday of the month, today we’ll invite you to browse a new Dewey Decimal class with your students on your next visit to your local library. This month: the Social 300s. 📚

Wednesday (6 January 2021) — Today is the birthday of the American poet Carl Sandburg (1878–1967). 🖋 And our Wednesday tour of World Heritage Sites this week will take you to the Mount Nimba Strict Nature Reserve in Guinea. 🇬🇳

Thursday (7 January 2021) — On this day in 1610, Galileo Galilei first reported that he had discovered several previously unknown moons orbiting the planet Jupiter — we now call them the Galilean moons: Ganymede, Callisto, Io, and Europa. You can see them from your backyard with almost any small telescope. 🔭 Today is also the birthday of the African-American writer and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960). 🖋

Friday (8 January 2021) — Today is the birthday of two great British scientists: the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), co-discoverer with Charles Darwin of the principle of natural selection, and the physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking (1942–2018). 🦋 🌌 And in another sphere of human accomplishment, today is also the birthday of Elvis Presley (1935–1977)! 🎸 Our homeschool poem-of-the-week for second week of January is Gail Mazur’s “Ice,” for homeschool dads and all wintertime learners. ⛸ And our Friday Bird Families post this week will introduce you to the Storks, Frigatebirds, Boobies, Gannets, Cormorants, Darters, and Pelicans. Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦅

Saturday (9 January 2021) — On this day in 1923, Spanish engineer Juan de la Cierva made the first successful flight in an autogyro (the ancestor of the modern helicopter). 🚁 And since this is the second Saturday of the month, we’ll introduce you to another one of the Great Stars of the northern hemisphere night sky. This month: Capella, the brightest star in the constellation Auriga the Charioteer. 🌟

Sunday (10 January 2021) — On this day in the year 49 B.C., Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon river and approached the city of Rome with his army, touching off a civil war that led to the destruction of the Roman Republic and the eventual formation of the Roman Empire. ⚔️ For an illustrated overview of the life and times of Julius Caesar and his outsized impact on the Western world, see pages 108–109 in your homeschool history encyclopedia. 📚

🥂 OUR WEEKLY TOAST: “To long life, pure love, and boundless liberty.”

❡ 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!”). Our current set of toasts are mostly taken from an old collection that appeared in Routledge’s Manual of Etiquette (London, ca. 1870). What will you toast this week? 🥂

🌎 🇬🇾 EVERYTHING FLOWS: Guyana in northern South America is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Essequibo River, Guyana’s longest river. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas (riverhouses.org/books), and you can read more about it in the Essequibo River entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

The Essequibo River in Guyana, from the air. (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, this month, and this wonderful new year? 😊

❡ 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 (riverhouses.org/newsletter) 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 (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us. 🗓

Filed Under: Quick Freshes

🌎 🇺🇸 SUNDAY STATES: Louisiana, Guatemala, Guyana, and More

3 January 2021 by Bob O'Hara

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

Many homeschoolers like to review the U.S. states and the nations of the world each year, and our recommended homeschool reference library (riverhouses.org/books) 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 (page 458 in your brand new 2021 almanac), so this week’s state is:

  • 🇺🇸
    Louisiana State Flag
    LOUISIANA (the 18th state, 30 April 1812) — The Pelican State. Capital: Baton Rouge. Louisiana can be found on page 579 in your almanac and on plates 40 and 142 in your atlas. Name origin: “Part of territory called Louisiana by René-Robert Cavelier Sieur de La Salle for French King Louis XIV” (almanac page 459). State bird: Brown Pelican (bird guide page 256). Website: www.louisiana.gov.

❡ Little lessons: You can teach a hundred little lessons with our state-of-the-week, using your reference library (riverhouses.org/books) 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:

  • 🇬🇹 GUATEMALA in Central America. Population: 17,153,288. Capital: Guatemala City. Government: Presidential republic. Website: www.guatemala.gob.gt (in Spanish).
  • 🇬🇳 GUINEA on the west coast of Africa. Population: 12,527,440. Capital: Conakry. Government: Presidential republic. Website: CIA World Factbook entry (in English).
  • 🇬🇼 GUINEA-BISSAU on the west coast of Africa. Population: 1,927,104. Capital: Bissau. Government: Semi-presidential republic. Website: CIA World Factbook entry (in English).
  • 🇬🇾 GUYANA in northern South America. Population: 750,204. Capital: Georgetown. Government: Parliamentary republic. Website: parliament.gov.gy (in English).

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

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

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

❡ Come, here’s the map: Teaching your students to be fluent with high-quality maps — not just basically competent, but fluent — is one of the best educational gifts you can give them. Why not look up any one of our selected states or countries each week in your recommended homeschool atlas (riverhouses.org/books) 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 (riverhouses.org/calendars) 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 (riverhouses.org/newsletter) to get more great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox every week. 🇺🇸 🌎

Filed Under: Homeschool States & Countries

🖋 ❄️ WONDERFUL WORDS: “What so soon will wake and grow”

2 January 2021 by Bob O'Hara

January is a cold month of waiting. We who have been through many Januaries know that eventually the warm world will burst forth again; but what if January is all you’ve ever known? That’s the question asked by Philip Larkin in “First Sight,” our homeschool poem-of-the-week for this first week of the new year, offered for all things born in January.

First Sight

Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.

As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth’s immeasureable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.

Philip Larkin (1922–1985) was one of the best-known English poets of the twentieth century. Although he was not a prolific writer, the small volumes of prose and poetry that he published received wide acclaim and have been appreciated by readers for decades. Very few people, even in the top tier, ever make a living from writing poetry, and Larkin was no exception: he spent most of his career working as a professional librarian, principally at the University of Hull in the north of England.

Larkin was a poetical master craftsman. Although his poems use ordinary language, they are often quite tightly structured, as you can see in the above example. Have your students count syllables: I find exactly seven in most lines and eight in just two. Look next at the rhyme-scheme: snow–air–know–glare–fro–fold–cold. I make it out to be ABABACC. Note also that the seven lines in both stanzas are divided in exactly the same way: one sentence for the first four lines, and then a second sentence for the last three. And he uses the same word, snow, at the end of both the first line and the last line, tying the whole poem together like a package with a string around it.

Many of Larkin’s poems have a prose-y feel to them because he often employs enjambment — the carrying over of a sentence or idea past the end of the line. We saw another good example of that technique earlier this school year in the poetry of Elizabeth Jennings. (“Enjambment” is a beautiful ten-dollar literary word that your high-school homescholars can latch onto.)

As you walk through the winter landscape this January, invite your students to think about all the life hidden around them: frozen roots, dormant seeds, sleeping caterpillars, mice in their burrows — all waiting to wake and grow.

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

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

❡ What so soon will wake and grow: 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. 😊

❡ 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 (riverhouses.org/newsletter) to get posts like these delivered right to your mailbox, and print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) to follow along with us as we visit fifty of our favorite friends over the course of the year. 📖

Filed Under: Homeschool Language & Literature, Poems-of-the-Week

🔭 WATCHERS OF THE SKIES – January 2021

2 January 2021 by Bob O'Hara

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 January 2021 from the Hubble Space Telescope’s website — it features (among other things) our term namesake, Orion, as well as last month’s and this month’s great stars, Aldebaran and Capella:

➢

And here’s another January night-sky review, courtesy of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California — it features this month’s planets and a special opportunity to view Uranus on the 20th:

➢

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:

  • ➢ Evening Sky Maps – Northern Hemisphere Edition (updated monthly)

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 January will be toward the middle of the month: the moon will be new (and the sky darkest) on the 13th. As always, you can look up the moon’s phases in your River Houses almanac (riverhouses.org/books) and also on the timeanddate.com website. 🌑🌓🌕🌗🌑

January is the middle month of Orion Term, the second of the four terms that make up the River Houses homeschool year. Our Great Star for the month of January is Capella (alpha Aurigae), the brightest star in the constellation Auriga the Charioteer, which we’ll be writing about next week. Print your own River Houses Star Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) 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 January? 😊

❡ 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 (riverhouses.org/books) 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 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. 🌌

❡ Make friendship with the stars: This is one of our regular Homeschool Astronomy posts. Add your name to our free River Houses mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox every week. 🔭

Filed Under: Homeschool Astronomy

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