The River Houses

A National Network of Local Homeschool Societies

🇺🇸 HOMESCHOOL HISTORY: Remembering 9/11

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Many homeschoolers during this twentieth-anniversary week will be looking for ways to remember and teach about the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. One simple thing to do is to show how other people marked the event soon after it occurred, and so give your students a sense of how it was experienced and responded to at the time.

One of the most moving memorials that took place shortly after the attacks was the singing of the U.S. National Anthem by the congregation of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London at a special commemoration held on September 14th. St. Paul’s is one of the world’s most famous churches, designed by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London in 1666 that destroyed much of the city. It survived the London bombings during World War II and has played an important role in the life of the British people for more than three centuries.

The words of our national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” were written in 1814 by Francis Scott Key on that very same day, September 14th, during another attack on the United States: the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore during what we now call the War of 1812 (which lasted more than two years). You’ll find a history of the anthem on page 521 of your homeschool almanac and on the website of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, which is today the home of the Star-Spangled Banner itself — the actual flag that Francis Scott Key saw flying over Fort McHenry in 1814.

The Star-Spangled Banner

O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Yes, Mr. Key — it does.

[Firefighters raising the American flag after the 9/11 attacks]
New York firefighters raise the star-spangled banner in the ruins of the World Trade Center on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. (Image: Thomas E. Franklin.)

What historical events and anniversaries are you marking in your homeschool this Cygnus Term?

❡ Explore more: The complete hour-long memorial service from St. Paul’s Cathedral in London on September 14th, 2001, is well worth watching. You and your students can find it at C-SPAN online. 📺

❡ National memorials: There are three major national memorials to the victims of the 9/11 attacks, as well as countless other smaller memorial sites. You and your students can visit the national memorials online this week, and perhaps in person some day on your homeschool travels: the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York, the Flight 93 National Memorial in Pennsylvania, and the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial in Washington, D.C. 🏛

❡ Follow along with us: This is one of our occasional Homeschool Holidays & Anniversaries posts. Add your name to our weekly mailing list and get more homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🇺🇸

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📸 PHOTO CHALLENGE – September 2021: “Heraldry” and “Lightboxes”

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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 September challenge is now open and the announced themes are “Coats of Arms” and “Lightbox Photography.” 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.

Roof of St, Mark’s Church, Zagreb, Croatia. A sample entry for the theme “Coats of Arms” 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 homemade light box for photographing small objects. A sample entry for the theme “Lightbox Photography” 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 will you be making in your homeschool this Cygnus 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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🖋 🍁 WONDERFUL WORDS: Song at the Beginning of Autumn

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What defines the seasons? Is it a change in temperature? Is it migrating birds? Or the position of the sun in the sky? Is it something in the air?

Here’s a wonderful poem for homeschool high-schoolers (and for mom and dad, too) that considers how the seasons arrive and what defines them. It’s from British poet Elizabeth Jennings (1926–2001), and it’s our poem-of-the-week for the second week of September — a perfect poem for the start of the new homeschool year.

Song at the Beginning of Autumn

Now watch this autumn that arrives
In smells. All looks like summer still;
Colours are quite unchanged, the air
On green and white serenely thrives.
Heavy the trees with growth and full
The fields. Flowers flourish everywhere.

Proust who collected time within
A child’s cake would understand
The ambiguity of this —
Summer still raging while a thin
Column of smoke stirs from the land
Proving that autumn gropes for us.

But every season is a kind
Of rich nostalgia. We give names —
Autumn and summer, winter, spring —
As though to unfasten from the mind
Our moods and give them outward forms.
We want the certain, solid thing.

But I am carried back against
My will into a childhood where
Autumn is bonfires, marbles, smoke;
I lean against my window fenced
From evocations in the air.
When I said autumn, autumn broke.

When you introduce your students to a new poem, especially one like this that is in a traditional form, take your time, and don’t worry about “getting” everything right away. A good poem is a friend for life, and as with any friend, it takes time to get acquainted.

[Elizabeth Jennings]
Elizabeth Jennings (1926–2001). (Image: Oxford Today.)
Before you even start to worry about meaning, take a look at the poem’s structure. How many lines does it have? Are the lines grouped into stanzas? How many lines in each stanza? How many syllables in each line? Many traditional poems are highly structured and fit together in an almost mathematical way, which you can discover by counting. Do the lines rhyme? What is the rhyme-scheme? By uncovering these details of structure your students will come to appreciate good poems as carefully crafted pieces of literary labor — a good lesson for high school students in particular who may be ready to move on from verses-for-children to poetry-for-adults.

“Song at the Beginning of Autumn” is a very precisely structured poem. If you count, you’ll find that every line has exactly eight syllables. (That pattern tells you that “flowers” should be pronounced here as something close to a one-syllable word: “flowrs” not “flow-ers.”) Do the lines have a rhyming pattern? They do. The lines of the first stanza end with arrives–still–air and thrives–full–where. We’ll call that ABC ABC, and if you check all the other stanzas you’ll find they’re exactly the same: ABC ABC.

If you try to read this poem aloud you’ll discover that it has a kind of prose-y feel — it doesn’t seem very “poetical” at first. What creates that sensation? The prose-y feel comes from Jennings’ deliberate use of a technique called enjambment — a wonderful literary term for your students to learn that refers to the mismatch between the line breaks of the poem and the natural grammatical pauses in the poem’s underlying sentences.

The opposite of enjambed verse is end-stopped verse, in which the line-ends correspond to natural grammatical breaks: “Whose woods these are I think I know (pause). / His house is in the village though (pause); / He will not see me stopping here / To watch his woods fill up with snow (pause).” That’s Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods,” a heavily end-stopped poem with a sing-song-y feel.

Contrast that with Jennings, with natural grammatical pauses added: “Now watch this autumn that arrives / In smells (pause). All looks like summer still (pause); / Colours are quite unchanged (pause), the air / On green and white serenely thrives (pause). / Heavy the trees with growth and full / The fields (pause). Flowers flourish everywhere (pause).” In her case, many of the natural grammatical pauses don’t coincide with the line-ends — that’s enjambment, and that’s what creates the prose-y feel of the poem.

You can ask your students some good vocabulary-related questions this week as you try to work through the poem’s meaning together. Who is Proust? What’s the difference between “colours” and “colors”? What’s the origin of the word “nostalgia”? (And how is it related to the word “analgesic”?) How is the word “broke” being used here? (Hint: it’s intransitive definition #13 in your recommended family dictionary.) (Wait, are you saying there are thirteen different definitions of “break/broke”? Actually, there are a lot more — send your students to the dictionary to find out!)

What wonderful words and poetical productions will you be studying in your homeschool this Cygnus Term? 😊

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

❡ Literary lives: If you want to learn more about Elizabeth Jennings, “one of the most popular, prolific, and widely anthologized lyric poets of the late twentieth century,” see if you local library can borrow this new biography for you: Elizabeth Jennings: The Inward War (Oxford University Press, 2018). 🖋

❡ 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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🌍 🇩🇿 WEEKLY WORLD HERITAGE: The M’Zab Valley in Algeria

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(This is our first Weekly World Heritage post for the 2021–2022 homeschool year. Print your own River Houses World Heritage Calendar and follow along with us, and add your name to our weekly mailing list to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year.)

Algeria in northern Africa is one of our homeschool countries-of-the-week, so why not spend a few minutes today learning about one of Algeria’s World Heritage Sites: the M’Zab Valley.

Traditional architecture of the M’Zab Valley, Algeria. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

The M’Zab Valley is an oasis in the Sahara Desert. It has been a place of human habitation for more than a thousand years:

Located 600 km south of Algiers, in the heart of the Sahara Desert, the five ksour (fortified villages) of the M’Zab Valley form an extraordinarily homogenous ensemble constituting, in the desert, the mark of a sedentary and urban civilization possessing an original culture that has, through its own merit, preserved its cohesion throughout the centuries. Comprised of ksour and palm groves of El-Atteuf, Bounoura, Melika, Ghardaïa and Beni-Isguen (founded between 1012 and 1350), the M’Zab Valley has conserved practically the same way of life and the same building techniques since the 11th century, ordered as much by a specific social and cultural context, as by the need for adaptation to a hostile environment, the choice of which responded to a historic need for withdrawal and a defensive imperative. Each of these miniature citadels, surrounded by walls, is dominated by a mosque, the minaret of which functions as a watchtower. The mosque is conceived as a fortress, the last bastion of resistance in the event of a siege, and comprises an arsenal and a grain store. Around this building, which is essential for communal life, are houses built in concentric circles up to the ramparts. Each house constitutes a cubic cell of standard type, illustrating an egalitarian society founded on the respect for the family structure, aiming at the preservation of its intimacy and autonomy. At the beginning of the first millennium, the Ibadis created in the M’Zab, with local materials, a vernacular architecture which, with its perfect adaptation to the environment and the simplicity of its forms, is an example and an influence for contemporary architecture and town-planning. (UNESCO World Heritage Centre #188)

You can find a gallery of additional photos of the M’Zab Valley 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 will you be exploring in your homeschool this Cygnus 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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📚 LEARNING THE LIBRARY: Introducing Dewey

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(This is the first installment of our homeschool tour of the Dewey Decimal system for the 2021–2022 year. Print your own River Houses Calendar to follow along with us, and add your name to our mailing list to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year.)

Tuesday is our usual Homeschool Books & Libraries Day in the River Houses — we think teaching your students how to use the library independently is one of the best educational gifts you can give them. Most public libraries in the United States arrange their books according to the Dewey Decimal Classification, so teaching the basics of the “DDC” is one of the first things you’ll want to do.

If you start in September at the beginning of the River Houses year and run until July, you can “adopt” one of the major Dewey Decimal classes each month and cover the whole of knowledge (!) in a year. Our first Books & Libraries post each month invites you to do just that, and since this is the very first Books & Libraries post of the entire year, we’ll begin by inviting you to orient your students to the organization of your local library as a whole.

The Dewey Decimal system arranges books into “hundreds” according to subject, and the major classes are:

  • MAJOR DEWEY DECIMAL CLASSES (“Hundreds”)
    • Class 000 – General Knowledge
    • Class 100 – Philosophy & Psychology
    • Class 200 – Religion
    • Class 300 – Social Sciences
    • Class 400 – Languages
    • Class 500 – Science
    • Class 600 – Technology
    • Class 700 – Arts & Recreation
    • Class 800 – Literature
    • Class 900 – History & Geography

By “hundreds” we mean the numbers running from 00 to 99 within each class: “the 300s” (Social Sciences) means the numbers running from 300 to 399; “the 500s” (Science) means the numbers running from 500 to 599; and so on.

On your next library visit, take a few minutes with your students to find the 000s (“the zero-hundreds”), and then follow the maze of shelves around the library all the way through the 100s, the 200s, the 300s, and so on, to the 999s. You can make it a fun little adventure for your children, and a beginning-of-the-year tradition. Don’t try to memorize the classification or analyze it in detail — just follow the numbers from beginning to end and your little lesson is done.

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 Cygnus Term? 😊

❡ Planning ahead: If you’d like to map out a custom year-long Dewey project for your homeschool, here’s the first-Tuesday schedule we follow in the River Houses: Introducing Dewey (September); The General 000s (October); The Philosophical 100s (November); The Religious 200s (December); The Social 300s (January); The Linguistic 400s (February); The Scientific 500s (March); The Technological 600s (April); The Artistic 700s (May); The Literary 800s (June); The Historical 900s (July); and On Beyond Dewey (August). You’ll find that sequence included on our main River Houses Calendar as well. 🗓

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

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

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🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 5 September 2021

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(This is the first of our regular Quick Freshes posts for the 2021–2022 homeschool year. Print your own River Houses Calendar to follow along with us, and add your name to our weekly mailing list to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year.)

Quick Freshes 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. Visit our River Houses calendar page to print your own homeschool calendars and planners for the entire year.

🗓 🦢 This is the first full week of CYGNUS TERM, our fall term in the River Houses. Cygnus Term runs from September through November.

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Delaware, and our COUNTRIES are Afghanistan 🇦🇫, Albania 🇦🇱, Algeria 🇩🇿, and Andorra 🇦🇩. (Our separate Sunday States & Countries post for the week, the first one of the brand new homeschool year, went up just a few minutes ago. Print your own River Houses States & Countries Calendar and follow along with us from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.)

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

🗓 TODAY, Sunday (5 September 2021) — Today is the 278th day of 2021; there are 117 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. 📚 In response to the Intolerable Acts, the first Continental Congress assembled on this day in 1774 in Philadelphia. 🇺🇸 And on this day in 1836, Sam Houston was elected the first President of the Republic of Texas. 🌵 (Yes, that’s what you get when you search for an emoji for Texas.)

Monday (6 September 2021) — Today is Labor Day, the U.S. federal holiday honoring the American labor movement, celebrated each year on the first Monday in September. 🛠 On this day in 1522, the ship Victoria, the only survivor of the Magellan expedition, arrived back in Spain having completed history’s first circumnavigation of the world. The voyage took just over three years. For a great homeschool overview of the early European voyages of exploration, turn to page 224 in your River Houses history encyclopedia. 🌍🌎🌏🌍 Today is also the birthday of English scientist John Dalton (1766–1844), one of the founders of modern chemistry. ⚗️

Tuesday (7 September 2021) — Today is the birthday of Queen Elizabeth I of England (1533–1603), who gave her name to the Elizabethan Era. For an illustrated homeschool review and timeline of this important historical period, turn to page 260 in your River Houses history encyclopedia. 👑 Today is also the birthday of the much-loved American painter Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860–1961), better known as Grandma Moses. 🎨 And since this is the first Tuesday of the month, today we’ll invite you and your students to learn all about your local library by starting on our twelve-month tour of the Dewey Decimal system. 📚

Wednesday (8 September 2021) — Today is one of the most important anniversary dates in American — nay, in world cultural history: on this day in 1966, the first episode of Star Trek, “The Man Trap,” was broadcast on NBC television. 🚀 🖖 Our Wednesday World Heritage tour for the 2021–2022 homeschool year will begin this week with a visit to the M’Zab Valley in Algeria. 🇩🇿 Print your own River Houses World Heritage Calendar and follow along with us. 🌎 And our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the second week of September is Elizabeth Jennings’ “Song at the Beginning of Autumn,” for the new homeschool year. Follow along with your own copy of our River Houses Poetry Calendar for the new year. 🖋

Thursday (9 September 2021) — Today is the birthday of the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910). 📚 It’s also the birthday of the American businessman Harland David Sanders (1890–1980), better known as Colonel Sanders, the founder of the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant chain. 🍗

Friday (10 September 2021) — Today is the birthday of the great English composer Henry Purcell (1659–1695). 🎵 It’s also the birthday of the American physicist Arthur Compton (1892–1962), winner of the 1927 Nobel Prize for his studies of electromagnetism. 🧲 Our Friday Bird Families post this week will introduce you to the Ducks, Geese, and Swans! Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦆

Saturday (11 September 2021) — Today is the 20th anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3000 people in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. 🇺🇸 It’s also the birthday of the Scottish explorer Mungo Park (1771–1806), one of the first Europeans to travel to the interior of Africa. 🌍 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: Deneb, the brightest star in the constellation Cygnus the Swan. 🌟

Sunday (12 September 2021) — This is the traditional date of the Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C., one of the most consequential battles in the history of the Western world, in which the Athenians and their allies defeated the armies of Darius the Great of Persia in his attempt to conquer mainland Greece. ⚔️ On this day in 1962, President John F. Kennedy declared that the United States would land a man on the moon “before this decade is out.” 🚀 🌕

🥂 🏡 OUR TOAST THIS WEEK is our traditional offering for the first week of every River Houses year: “A little health, a little wealth, a little house, and freedom.”

❡ 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: Algeria on the Mediterranean coast of Africa is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Sebaou River, which flows northward into the Mediterranean Sea. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Sebaou River entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

The mouth of the Sebaou River near Dellys, Algeria. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

❡ Children 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 this week, this month, this term, and this wonderful homeschool 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 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: Delaware, Afghanistan, Andorra, and More

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(This is the first of our regular Sunday States & Countries posts for the 2021–2022 homeschool year. Print your own River Houses States & Countries Calendar to follow along with us, and add your name to our weekly mailing list to get great homeschool ideas sent right to your mailbox all through the year.)

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 (today!) and goes through the states in the traditional order of admission to the Union (almanac page 458), so this week’s state is:

  • 🇺🇸
    Delaware State Seal
    DELAWARE (7 December 1787) — The First State. Capital: Dover. Delaware can be found on page 574 in your almanac and on plates 43 and 142 in your atlas (10th and 11th eds.). Name origin: “Named for Lord De La Warr, early governor of Virginia; first applied to river, then to Indian tribe (Lenni-Lenape)” (almanac page 459). State bird: Blue Hen Chicken. Website: delaware.gov.

Delaware’s state bird is one of the few you won’t find in your bird guide because it’s a domestic species, not a wild one. All the varieties of domestic chickens are descendants of the Red Junglefowl of southern Asia, a member of the Phasianidae, which also includes the pheasants and turkeys (bird guide page 58). 🐔

❡ Little lessons: You can teach a hundred little lessons with our state-of-the-week posts, 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, to start off the brand new homeschool year, are:

  • 🇦🇫 AFGHANISTAN in southwestern Asia. Population: 36,643,815. Capital: Kabul. Government: In transition. Website: president.gov.af (in English, Pashto, and Persian; may no longer be accessible).
  • 🇦🇱 ALBANIA in southeastern Europe. Population: 3,074,579. Capital: Tirana. Government: Parliamentary republic. Website: e-albania.al (in Albanian).
  • 🇩🇿 ALGERIA in northwestern Africa. Population: 42,972,878. Capital: Algiers. Government: Presidential republic. Website: el-mouradia.dz/ (in French and Arabic).
  • 🇦🇩 ANDORRA in southwestern Europe. Population: 85,635. Capital: Andorra la Vella. Government: Parliamentary democracy. Website: govern.ad (in Catalan).

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) will you be making in your homeschool this Cygnus 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 (10th and 11th eds.) 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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🔭 WATCHERS OF THE SKIES – September 2021

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(This is the first of our regular Saturday astronomy posts for the 2021–2022 homeschool year. Add your name to our weekly mailing list to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year.)

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 September from the Hubble Space Telescope’s website — it features September constellations and also globular star clusters that can be seen with a backyard telescope:

And here’s another September night-sky review, courtesy of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California — it features September planets and some of our brightest nearby stars:

One of the easiest astronomical exercises you and your students can do each month is print out your own 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.) Give a copy to your students and ask them to study it and report back to you on three notable things you can watch for this month. (And as they report to you, ask them questions about what they’re telling you.) Do that for a few minutes each month, and before you know it you’ll have a skywatching expert in your homeschool.

The best stargazing nights in September will be toward the beginning of the month: the moon will be new (and the sky darkest) on Monday the 6th. As always, you can look up the moon’s phases in your River Houses almanac and also on the timeanddate.com website. 🌑🌓🌕🌗🌑

September is the first month of Cygnus Term, our fall term in the River Houses. Our Great Star for the month of September is Deneb (alpha Cygni), the tail-star of Cygnus the Swan, 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. 🌟

September is also the month of the autumnal (fall) equinox in the northern hemisphere — the astronomical beginning of fall — which “falls” this year on Wednesday the 22nd. (In the southern hemisphere the 22nd will be the vernal equinox — the astronomical beginning of spring.) On the day of the equinox we experience almost exactly twelve hours of light and twelve hours of darkness: “equal night and light.” 🌚🌞

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

❡ 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. 🌌

❡ Worlds scoop their arcs: Where are the planets right now? Not as we see them in the sky, but rather where are they in their orbits around the sun? Find out at The Planets Today. 🪐

❡ 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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🦅 FRIDAY BIRD FAMILIES for 2021–2022: Getting to Know Your Bird Guide

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(This is the first installment of our 2021–2022 homeschool review of the birds of North America. Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow along with us, and add your name to our mailing list to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year.)

A new homeschool year has begun! That means it’s time to begin a brand new series of Friday Bird Families posts that will take you and your students on a grand tour of the wonderful wild birds of North America. You can find a printable schedule for the tour on the main River Houses calendar page.

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 solitary or social, it can be as elementary or as advanced as you wish, and birds can be found just about anywhere at any season of the year.

Like our Sunday States & Countries posts, Friday Bird Families is an opportunity for homeschool teachers to do a light and easy ten-minute lesson each week that can introduce their students to some new facts, vocabulary, and ideas, while at the same time providing a springboard for more in-depth study by anyone who wishes to learn more.

Over the course of the year we’re going to go though our recommended homeschool bird guide and highlight one or two groups of American birds each week — names for your students to know and wildlife for them to watch for — and we’ll mix these brief highlights with a few concepts and skills from biology, geography, natural history, and general science that your students can learn and practice.

Next week we’ll “dive” in with the Ducks, Geese, and Swans, but for this first Friday Bird Families post of the year we’ll begin by introducing you and your students to the bird guide we recommend and will be using: the National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America (7th Edition).

This recommended field guide isn’t a children’s book per se — it’s a standard reference book for the whole family. The front and back cover flaps are visual guides to all of the 87 bird families we’ll be looking at over the course of the year — from the Ducks, Geese, and Swans to the Blackbirds and Orioles, and everything in between — with a representative species or two shown for each. Browse through those pictures with your students to give them a general sense of North American bird diversity and to show them how to find the relevant pages for each family. 🦆

The guide’s helpful front matter includes important general explanations and diagrams — for example, of the parts of a bird. Don’t try to memorize that information — just know where it is so you and your students will be able to refer to it whenever a question arises. (“This description says the bird’s ‘lores’ are yellow. Where in the world are the ‘lores’?”)

The main body of the guide contains the species descriptions and illustrations, with text on the left and matching illustrations on the right. These pages are dense with information. Pay particular attention to the range maps shown for each species and to the map-key on the book’s back flap that shows how to interpret the maps. (That little brown bird in your back yard may look like a Smith’s Longspur, but if you live in Nevada, I guarantee that’s not what it is.) 🔎

Although we certainly hope your students will learn many interesting things about birds over the course of the year from our Friday Bird Families posts, an equally important goal of this miniature course of study is to get your students to become comfortable with complex, structured information and the tools people use — like this bird guide — to organize and interact with that information. Our bird guide for these little lessons can stand as an example of the kind of detailed technical reference that your students will encounter all through high school, in higher education, and in professional life. When I taught college-level biology I often encountered students who struggled because they didn’t know how to use the basic reference tools right in their hands — glossaries, indexes, maps, explanatory charts, summary endpapers, tables of definitions, and the like. Together we can make sure that your students are fluent in the use of all these tools. 👩🏻‍🎓

So here’s to a new River Houses year! What wonderful ornithological observations and naturalistical notes will you be making in the homeschool year ahead? 😊

❡ 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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🖋 🏡 “A HANDSOME HOUSE to lodge a friend, a river at my garden’s end”

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(This is our first homeschool poem-of-the-week for the 2021–2022 school year. Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us, and add your name to our weekly mailing list to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year.)

Romania (not Rome) remembered Horace in 1965.
Every great institution should have a motto (or two). The United States has “E Pluribus Unum” and “In God We Trust.” The Supreme Court has “Equal Justice Under Law.” The Boy Scouts have “Be Prepared.” McDonald’s has “I’m lovin’ it.”

The motto of the River Houses is Hoc erat in votis, which we translate freely as “This was ever my wish.” The phrase comes from Book II of the Satires of the ancient Roman poet Horace, written about 30 B.C. “Satire” in the Horatian sense doesn’t carry the sharp connotation that it carries in modern English. Horace’s Satires are poems of daily life — modest, sometimes self-deprecating, never grandiloquent, mindful of human foibles and often amused by them.

The sixth satire in Horace’s Book II begins with a famous image of domestic contentment, just as we might wish for in a homeschool — aye, there’s the connection — and this little extract in its several renderings counts as our first homeschool poem-of-the-week for every new River Houses year:

Hoc erat in votis: modus agri non ita magnus,
hortus ubi et tecto vicinus iugis aquae fons
et paulum silvae super his foret.

The prose translator of the Loeb Classical Library’s edition of Horace renders it as:

This is what I prayed for! — a piece of land not so very large, where there would be a garden, and near the house a spring of ever-flowing water, and up above these a little bit of woodland.

“In the opening words,” the translator observes, “Horace gives utterance to a feeling of deep satisfaction as he contemplates the scene before him in the morning sunshine. His former prayer has been realized. Hence the past tense of erat.” This was ever my wish — and now here it all is before me.

Horace’s expression of contentment with domestic life has long been a favorite of country estate owners, and it has often been inscribed on the walls of rural villas.

[Hoc erat in votis]
Horace in the wild, inscribed on the wall of the Poggio Verde country villa in Lombardy, Italy. “Nil amplius oro.” (“Nothing more do I ask.”) (Image: ilpoggioverde.com.)

Here in the River Houses, we think these ancient lines from Horace capture something of the homeschooling ideal as well, and that’s why we’ve drawn our motto from them. A home with family and friends, a garden and a little stream — nothing more do we ask.

The verse translation that we especially like is this one from the Anglo-Irish poet Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) — it captures some of Horace’s light-heartedness:

I’ve often wished that I had clear,
For life, six hundred pounds a year,
A handsome house to lodge a friend,
A river at my garden’s end,
A terrace walk, and half a rood
Of land, set out to plant a wood.

Starting from the Latin original and abbreviating Swift, we can produce this extended version of the River Houses motto: Hoc erat in votis — This was ever my wish: a handsome house to lodge a friend, a river at my garden’s end.

Nothing more do we ask.

What wonderful words and poetical productions will you be studying in your homeschool this Cygnus Term? 😊

❡ A river at my garden’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. 🏡

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