The River Houses

A National Network of Local Homeschool Societies

🔎 HOMESCHOOL RESEARCH AND NEWS – September 2019

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-09-research

Around the middle of each month we post a quick roundup of some recent academic publications and news about homeschooling, offered for your interest. These are typically university research papers, and they may have a positive, negative, or neutral outlook on home education — and if they don’t seem appealing, just scroll on by. The title links generally point to the full text of each publication (often a pdf file). (Facebook readers should click to the attached blog post to find these links live.) The abstracts are quoted in full when possible, without editing.

The first item this month is the introduction to a notable series of papers devoted to homeschooling in a special issue of The Peabody Journal of Education (Volume 94.3, July 2019):

(1) New Frontiers in Research and Practice on Homeschooling — Albert Cheng and Michael Donnelly

Introduction: In 2000 and 2013, The Peabody Journal of Education published issues about homeschooling, providing a platform to deliberate on what was in 2000 a burgeoning movement in the United States and has now become a population estimated by the National Center on Education Statistics (NCES) to number between 3% to 4% of the school-age population (Snyder, de Brey, & Dillow, 2018).

There are also indications that home education is a growing global phenomenon. The recent Wiley Handbook of Home Education devoted an entire section to homeschooling practice worldwide (Gaither, 2017). Moreover, in the past 6 years three global conferences have been held on the subject, the most recent of which was held in Russia with over 1,000 participants. The conference included a research track yielding dozens of papers, several of which are included in this issue. Holding a conference about home education in Russia is itself an intriguing occurrence worthy of consideration in the context of geopolitical happenings. Since then, a new organization called the Global Home Education Exchange Counsel has formed (www.ghex.world) with a mission that includes supporting more and diverse research on home education.

In the 2000 and 2013 issues on homeschooling in this journal, supporters and critics alike drew upon political philosophy and legal thought to make normative arguments about the legitimacy of homeschooling or to debate how homeschooling and the policy environments under which the practice was regulated and exercised could benefit or harm not only individual students but also collective aspects of civic life. Researchers reviewed the literature to evaluate claims of the efficacy of homeschooling on academic achievement, postsecondary preparation, and socialization. The issue also explored the impact of home education on the education profession and education research. […]

The following collection of articles highlights the change that homeschooling practice and research has undergone. It features unique populations of homeschoolers and the way they practice homeschooling. Although there is still much more room for improvement, it is often helpful to pause and take stock of how the field has progressed over time.

[Seven separate papers are included in the issue; they are not individually abstracted here.]

(2) The Influence of Homeschooling on the Lives of College Graduates: A Transcendental Phenomenological Study — Jennifer R. Elliott

Abstract: The purpose of this transcendental phenomenological study was to describe the influence of a K–12 home education on the academic, familial, spiritual, and vocational aspects of the adult lives of select four-year college graduates. Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory framed this study, as it purports that learning and development occur in the symbiotic relationship between learner and environment. Central research question:How do select four-year college graduates describe the influence of a K–12 home education on their adult lives?Sub-questions: (a) How do participants describe the impact of a K–12 home education on their experiences in higher education? (b) How do participants describe the impact of a K–12 home education on their relationships with their parents? (c) How do participants describe the impact of a K–12 home education on their spiritual journey? (d) How do participants describe the impact of a K–12 home education on their vocational choice? Fourteen participants were selected via purposeful, snowball sampling, and data collection was triangulated via personal interviews, focus groups, and document analysis. Data were analyzed utilizing Moustakas’s modified Stevick–Colaizzi–Keen approach to transcendental phenomenology. Research question responses indicated that (a) participants felt prepared for college because of critical thinking skills as well as experience in dual enrollment, co-ops, and outside classes, (b) the greatest challenges in college were balancing a heavy course load and navigating new social dynamics/venues, (c) most participants had close relationships with their parents, (d) homeschooling helped lay a strong faith foundation, and participants’ faith was similar to their parents’, and (e) there was a connection between homeschooling experiences and vocational choice.

(3) The Correlation Between Trait Emotional Intelligence and Feelings of Social Isolation in Alaskan Homeschool Students — Daniel S. Wolfe

Abstract: This study examined the relationship between trait emotional intelligence (TEI) and feelings of social isolation in children that homeschool in rural and remote areas of Alaska. The topic of social isolation has continued to be prominent in the homeschool research. Tenuous claims resulting from studies that lack methodological rigor and representative sample sizes have perpetuated the debate by producing disparate conclusions with inherent limitations. This study acknowledged, that given a particular set of circumstances, the likelihood that an individual will experience feelings of social isolation increases. The compounding of conditions such as geographic isolation, time spent without access to a peer group, and extremes in seasonal conditions, contribute to a reasonable concern about the susceptibility to feelings of social isolation for homeschoolers in rural and remote areas of the state. The purpose of this study was to add to the homeschooling research by investigating the relationship between TEI, as measured by the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire-Children’s Short Form (TEIQue-CSF), and feelings of social isolation, as measured by the Children’s Loneliness and Social Dissatisfaction Scale, in a distinct population with practical application. This study found a statistically significant relationship between the variables, which should compel a change of focus from the unproductive social isolation debate, toward a more useful exploration of potential measures to prevent, mitigate, or alleviate feelings of social isolation and the associated harmful effects.

(4) Effective Home School Programming for Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder — Glennda Mckeithan, Anne Mendoza, and Deborah E. Griswold

Abstract: Many parents and/or caregivers of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are frustrated with services offered and/or provided through the public school setting. The services for children with ASD may be limited because teachers may not be adequately prepared to meet the needs of the increasing number of students being identified with ASD, and/or because students with ASD may not respond to traditional methods of instruction. Some parents of children with ASD are concerned with educational programming available through public school systems because they may believe public schools are unable and/or unwilling to develop and implement effective programming. Thus, the decision to remove these children from public school and provide services through home schools has become increasingly more prevalent as parent educators can provide more individualized and structured routines and curriculum options. This article provides an overview some guidelines/suggestions for developing effective home school programming that can help parents of children with ASD reflect on and/or revise current homeschool instructional strategies in conjunction with evidence-based practices. In sharing the information, we hope to help others work collaboratively to improve the academic and social learning outcomes for homeschooled children with ASD.

(5) The Changing Landscape of Homeschooling in the United States — Aaron Hirsh

Abstract: Educating children at home is a growing practice in the United States: the homeschool movement—frequently left out of the conversation about education—has much to teach us about creating more customized and effective school systems aimed at producing better outcomes for students. Homeschool families are hyper-autonomous units with tremendous freedom to create curriculum, redesign typical learning pathways, and build innovative partnerships.

Homeschooling is not a monolith and it is not static. These diverse homeschooling families are taking several innovative approaches to redesigning education—forming partnerships with districts, organizing themselves into collaboratives, and finding ways to promote equity.

Homeschooling has been legal in every state since the 1990s. While only 3 percent of K–12 students in the United States are homeschooled, this percentage has grown since 1999 and shows signs of continuing to increase. Homeschooling impacts the lives of millions of children and yet is understudied compared to other sectors of U.S. education.

This brief describes the state of homeschooling in the U.S. in 2019. Section I explores the changing demographics of homeschoolers. Section II gives an overview of new forms of homeschooling, including hybrid models. Section III outlines the variety of state policies that govern homeschooling.

What interesting homeschool news and research have you come across lately? 👩🏻‍🎓

❡ Explore more: If you’d like to investigate the academic literature on homeschooling, the best place to start is Google Scholar (scholar.google.com), the special academic search engine from Google. Just enter a search term or phrase of interest (“homeschool,” “unschooling,” “classical homeschooling,” “deschooling,” etc.), and Google Scholar will return a list of academic publications that mention your topic. 🔎

❡ Stay in the loop: This is one of our regular Homeschool Research & News posts. Add your name to our free weekly mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🗞

🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 15 September 2019

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-09-15

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 (riverhouses.org/calendars) and print your own homeschool calendars for the entire year.

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is New Jersey, and our COUNTRIES are Australia 🇦🇺, Austria 🇦🇹, Azerbaijan 🇦🇿, and the Bahamas 🇧🇸. (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, just passing full (yesterday). 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 many more stellar and lunar facts on pages 342–357 in your almanac (riverhouses.org/books).

🗓 TODAY (Sunday, 15 September 2019) — Today is the 258th day of 2019; there are 107 days remaining in the year. Learn more about different kinds of modern and historical calendars on pages 358–364 in your River Houses almanac (riverhouses.org/books). 📚 Today is also the birthday of writer and illustrator Robert McCloskey (1914–2003), author of Make Way for Ducklings (1941) and other children’s classics. 🦆 Our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the third week of September is Elizabeth Jennings’ “Song at the Beginning of Autumn,” for the autumn about to arrive. 🍂 Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us throughout the year. 🖋

Monday (16 September 2019) — On this day in 1776, with George Washington in direct command, the Continental Army in New York successfully defended several key positions on Manhattan Island in the Battle of Harlem Heights. ⚔️

Tuesday (17 September 2019) — Today is Constitution Day! On this day in 1787, the U.S. Constitution was signed in Philadelphia by the members of the Constitutional Convention. Why not pay a homeschool visit to the original Constitution today at its current home in the National Archives. 🇺🇸 Today is also the anniversary of the Battle of Antietam in 1862, one of the bloodiest days in American history, with more than 22,000 Union and Confederate casualties. ⚔️

Wednesday (18 September 2019) — Today is the birthday of the great English writer and lexicographer Samuel Johnson (1709–1784). 📖 And on this day in 1793, President George Washington, dressed in his masonic regalia, laid the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol Building. 🏛

Thursday (19 September 2019) — Arrrr! It’s International Talk-Like-a-Pirate Day, me hearties! ☠ On this day in 1991, “Ötzi the Iceman,” a 5000-year-old naturally preserved mummy, was discovered frozen in the ice along the Alpine border between Italy and Austria. 🏔

Friday (20 September 2019) — On this day in 1519, Ferdinand Magellan set sail from the coast of southern Spain with five ships and 270 men in the first expedition to successfully circumnavigate the globe. 🌍🌎🌏🌍

Saturday (21 September 2019) — Today is the birthday of the great English composer Gustav Holst (1874–1934). 🎵 And on this day in 1981, Sandra Day O’Connor (b. 1930) was unanimously approved by the U.S. Senate as the first female Supreme Court justice. 👩‍⚖️

Sunday (22 September 2019) — On this day in 1776, American spy Nathan Hale, age 21, was executed by the British in New York City. His final words were said to be, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” 🇺🇸 Today is also the birthday of the great physicist Michael Faraday (1791–1867). ⚡️ And … today is Hobbit Day! 🌋

🥂 OUR WEEKLY TOAST, for Nathan Hale: “To our native land — may it ever continue the abode of freedom and the birthplace of heroes.”

❡ 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 variety in toasting!”). Our current set of toasts are mostly taken from an old anthology called The Perfect Gentleman; or, Etiquette and Eloquence (New York, 1860). What will you toast this week? 🥂

🌍 EVERYTHING FLOWS: Austria is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Traun River, one of the principal tributaries of the Danube. You can chart its course in your recommended homeschool atlas (riverhouses.org/books), and you can read more about it in the Traun River entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

The Traun River near Steeg in the Tyrolian region of Austria. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

❡ Let the river run: 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 691–693), and make it a project to look them all up in your atlas, or in a handy encyclopedia either online or on a weekly visit to your local library. A whole world of geographical learning awaits you. 🌍

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

❡ Lively springs: This is one of our regular “Quick Freshes” posts looking at the homeschool week ahead. Add your name to our River Houses mailing list (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. 🗓

🇺🇸 🌎 SUNDAY STATES: New Jersey, Australia, the Bahamas, and More

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-new-jersey

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 annual review begins at the start of the River Houses year in September and we go through the states in the traditional order of admission to the Union (almanac page 429), so this week’s state is:

  • 🇺🇸
    New Jersey State Bird and Flower
    NEW JERSEY (the 3rd state, 18 December 1787) — The Garden State. Capital: Trenton. New Jersey can be found on page 579 in your almanac and on plates 43 and 142 in your atlas. Name origin: “The Duke of York, in 1664, gave a patent to Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret for Nova Caesaria, or New Jersey, after England’s Isle of Jersey” (almanac page 430). State bird: American Goldfinch (bird guide page 442). Website: nj.gov.

❡ Little lessons: You can teach a hundred little lessons with the 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 world of new geographical and historical information, as well as a host of valuable reading and research skills. 😊

❡ Explore more: If you’re planning an extended unit-study of one or more of the U.S. states, be sure to look into the primary source materials for teachers available at the Library of Congress.

This week’s countries, with their official websites, are:

  • 🇦🇺 AUSTRALIA between the southwestern Pacific and Indian Oceans. Population: 23,470,145. Capital: Canberra. Website: australia.gov.au (in English).
  • 🇦🇹 AUSTRIA in south-central Europe. Population: 8,793,370. Capital: Vienna. Website: bundeskanzleramt.gv.at (in German and English).
  • 🇦🇿 AZERBAIJAN in southwestern Asia. Population: 10,046,516. Capital: Baku. Website: president.az (in Azerbaijani, Russian, and English).
  • 🇧🇸 THE BAHAMAS in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida. Population: 332,634. Capital: Nassau. Website: www.bahamas.gov.bs (in English).

These countries all appear in your current almanac, atlas, and history encyclopedia as well (riverhouses.org/books). The almanac, for example, has profiles of all the nations of the world on pages 745–852; 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 geographical discoveries have you made in your homeschool this week? 😊

❡ 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. 🔍

❡ 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. 🇺🇸 🌎

🌕 RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES for Homeschool Students – September 2019

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-09-lunar

(This is our first monthly “Lunar Society” report for the 2019–2020 homeschool year. Browse through our listing of some of the real scientific and scholarly projects, investigations, transcriptions, analyses, and computations that your students can work on from the comfort of your little home academy, and add your name to our free weekly mailing list to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year.)

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

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

Here’s an outline of the idea, along with a list of some of the great projects that homeschool students (and their parents) can join and contribute to, from history to geography to physics to natural history to mathematics to meteorology to literature to galactic exploration:

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

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

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

On the eBird website (eBird.org), sponsored by Cornell University, I’ve been tracking the birds in a small riverside park near me (eBird hotspot L6926932) and have so far contributed a total of 590 checklists (daily observation reports) for this locality — it’s a site that had never been documented before. When all the checklists are combined and charted automatically by eBird you can really get a sense of the seasonal distribution and migration patterns for the year — take a look:

Here’s a sample checklist so you can see what they look like:

There was a record for one new species this month, never before seen at this locality: a Marsh Wren.

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

Distributed computing projects use idle time on your computer to perform scientific calculations on various kinds of complex data. The most popular distributed computing projects run on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing platform (BOINC), and I contribute computer time (whenever my laptop is plugged in) to three of these: (1) the SETI@Home project, sponsored by the University of California, which searches for extraterrestrial intelligence (really!); (2) the Einstein@Home project, which studies neutron stars; and (3) the MilkyWay@Home project, which studies the history and structure of our galaxy.

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

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

Facebook users click to: riverhouses.org/2019-09-lunar

That’s just a simple graphing exercise — it’s something that can be refined, developed, and expanded in the future. (And your students can develop their own individual charts as well.)

The Internet provides exceptional opportunities for homeschool students to participate in real research projects in a variety of scientific and scholarly fields, something that would have been impossible only a few years ago. Pay a visit to our Lunar Society page to read about many more projects that your family can join.

What scholarly and scientific discoveries have you made in your homeschool this month? 😊

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

❡ Featured this month at Zooniverse: Looking for a place to start? Zooniverse.org is one of the biggest clearinghouses for citizen science projects, and each month on their front page they specially feature one of their many research projects that you can join. This month’s featured project is “Planetary Response Network: Hurricane Dorian.” (Yes, that’s something you and your students can really help with from your home computer.) If you’re looking for a project to get yourself started, this might be a good choice. 😊

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

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

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

🌟 STAR BRIGHT: Deneb for September

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-deneb

(This is the first of our monthly “Star Bright” posts for the 2019–2020 homeschool year. Print your own River Houses Star Calendar and follow along with us, and add your name to our free weekly mailing list to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year.)

September is the first month of Cygnus Term in the River Houses, and as our monthly star calendar will show you, September’s Great Star is Deneb, the brightest star in the constellation Cygnus the Swan. Its formal designation is α Cygni — “alpha of Cygnus.” Cygnus and Deneb are high in the east at dusk now, passing overhead in the early evening and flying to the west as the night goes on.

Star chart of the constellation Cygnus and its alpha star, Deneb, marking the tail of the Great Swan. The plane of the Milky Way passes right along the axis of Cygnus and this whole area is rich with stars. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

If you want to introduce your students to Deneb and Cygnus, you can start with some basic astronomy from your backyard star guide (riverhouses.org/books):

“Cygnus lies in what for observers is a dense and fascinating part of the sky. The bird’s wings span the Milky Way at a location packed with stars and an assortment of deep-sky objects. Owing to the positions of its bright stars it is sometimes called the Northern Cross — the northern parallel to the brilliant Southern Cross constellation in the Southern Hemisphere. You will see Cygnus highest in the sky in late summer and early fall, with its head pointing south like a bird on its migratory path toward warmer climates.

“Deneb, the alpha star and tail of the bird, is a brilliant magnitude-1 star that joins Altair and Vega to form the Summer Triangle. Deneb is 25 times more massive than our sun and 60,000 times more luminous.“ (Backyard Guide to the Night Sky, page 216)

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

A magnificent annotated image of the whole region of Cygnus, with its alpha star Deneb in the lower left, and with the Swan “flying” diagonally up to the right. This image has been processed to reveal the vast areas of hydrogen gas, glowing here in red, all through this region of the sky. (Image: Rolf Geissinger via apod.nasa.gov.)

Deneb is an enormous blue-white supergiant, about 200 times the diameter of our sun. If it were placed at the center of our solar system it would extend out to engulf the orbits of Mercury, Venus, and the Earth. Deneb is estimated to be about 2,600 light years away, so the photons striking your eye when you gaze upon it were actually emitted by the star 2,600 years ago — when the ancient Greek poet Sappho was composing her lyrics in the eastern Aegean — and they have been traveling at the speed of light to greet us ever since. The name Deneb is Arabic for tail — it’s the tail of the swan for us, but for medieval Arabic astronomers it was usually imagined as the tail of a heavenly hen.

Some time during this first month of Cygnus Term, take your homeschool students out at dusk and introduce them to this giant sun, and teach them its name, and so give them a new friend for life.

What stellar observations have you made in your homeschool lately? 😊

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

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

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

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

🦆 FRIDAY BIRD FAMILIES: Ducks, Geese, and Swans (I)

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-anatidae

Every Friday in the River Houses we invite you and your students to learn about a different group of North American birds from your recommended homeschool bird guide (riverhouses.org/books) — it’s a great way to add a few minutes of informal science, geography, natural history, and imagination to your homeschool schedule. (We started this new feature last week with an introduction to your bird guide.)

This week’s family is the Ducks, Geese, and Swans — the Anatidae (bird guide page 14). Usually we’ll cover a couple of families each week, but the ducks, geese, and swans are such a large group we’ll spread them out over two weeks.

[Follow attached blog link for media]

With smaller children, you can take our Friday Bird Families posts as opportunities to just use your bird guide as a picture book and spend a few minutes looking at all the wonderful wildlife. For older students, one of our objectives is to help them become fluent with a technical reference book that’s packed with dense information. Here’s the introduction to this bird family — you’ll find it on page 14:

“DUCKS · GEESE · SWANS — Family Anatidae. Worldwide family. Web-footed, gregarious birds, ranging from small ducks to swans. Largely aquatic, but geese, swans, and some ‘puddle ducks’ also graze on land. Species: 160 World, 66 N.A. [North America].“

If you’re training young naturalists, teach them to ask and answer from the reference guide the very first questions any naturalist would ask about a new group: How many species? (160.) Where do they occur? (Worldwide.) Are there any near us? (Yes, 66 species in North America, and the individual maps will give us more detail.) What are their distinctive features? (Web-footed, varying in size, mostly aquatic, and as you can see from scanning the pictures, most have fairly plump bodies, short legs, and long necks.) And by the way, “gregarious” is a beautiful word, isn’t it — be sure to send someone to your homeschool dictionary to look that one up. 🔎

Pick a representative species 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 example, why not investigate one of the most familiar of all North American birds: the Canada Goose (pages 20–21).

All sorts of biological information is packed into the brief Canada Goose species description on page 20 — can your students tease it out? How big is this bird? (30–43 inches long — quite variable!) What’s its scientific name? (Branta canadensis.) Canada Goose is a species that has a lot of geographical variation across the continent, so part of the description explains that in detail, and the illustrations on the facing page show some of that variation as well. What does it sound like? (Honk-a-lonk.😊) Where does this species occur? Will you be able to find it where you live? At what times of year? (Study the range description and range map carefully to answer those questions, and see the book’s back flap for a map key.)

[Follow attached blog link for media]

Like many other geese, Canada Geese are famous for their large “vees” — migratory flight formations — surely one of the most magnificent sights in the natural world. (That photo is one of my own.)

And of course everyone loves Canada Geese because they honk. 🔊

[Follow attached blog link for media]

You can do a little ten-minute study just like this with any of the species in your bird guide that catch your interest. Take a look at the four species of swans on page 22, for example — can your students figure out how they differ from each other? (They are very tricky to identify — you’re teaching your students to pay attention to fine details here.) Our fall term in the River Houses, just getting underway, is Cygnus Term. Where might that name come from? 🦢

In all these Friday Bird Families posts, our aim will not be to have you teach specific facts. What we hope to do instead is to provide starting points that you and your students can branch away from in many different directions, and also to show how you can help your students develop the kind of careful reading, observation, and interpretation skills that they will use in all their future academic work.

What ornithological discoveries have you made in your homeschool this week? 😊

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

❡ Words for birds: You may not think of your homeschool dictionary (riverhouses.org/books) as a nature reference, but a comprehensive dictionary will define 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 learn to look for in the dictionary is the information on word origins: understanding the roots of scientific terms makes it much easier to understand 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 (riverhouses.org/books) includes an excellent world atlas that will help your students understand many aspects of biogeography — the science of the geographical distribution of living things. 🌎

❡ Rivers in the sky: How many birds are migrating this week? You can find out from the BirdCast website, also sponsored by Cornell University, which offers daily bird migration forecasts in the spring and fall for the entire United States. 🦅

❡ State birds: One member of our bird-family-of-the-week is a United States state bird: the Hawaiian Goose or Nene (Branta sandvicensis). Paradoxically, you won’t be able to find the Hawaiian Goose in your North American bird guide, however, because Hawaii, while part of the United States, isn’t part of North America! But don’t despair: the Hawaiian Goose species profile on the eBird website will let you learn more about it. 🇺🇸

❡ Nature notes: This is one of our regular Homeschool Natural History posts. Add your name to our free weekly mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🦆

⚔️ REMEMBERING the Battle of Marathon, 490 B.C.

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-marathon

Today is the traditional anniversary date of the Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C., one of the most consequential battles in the history of the Western world. It’s a name and an event every homeschool student should know, so why not remember it with your students today and perhaps engage in a little “what-if” speculation.

The Battle of Marathon took place on the east coast of mainland Greece near a small town called Marathon, about 26 miles northeast of Athens. Soldiers from the fledgling democracy of Athens and its ally Plataea defeated a much larger army sent by Darius I, ruler of the Persian Empire, to conquer mainland Greece. The Athenian and Persian forces formed up in lines facing each other on the plain beside the shoreline, and in a classic military maneuver, the Greeks fell back in the center of the line, drawing the Persians toward them, and then closed around with both flanks. The Persian army was crushed in the jaws of this vise and collapsed. The Greeks rushed back to Athens, 26 miles away — which is why we call a 26-mile race a Marathon — fearing that the Persians would reassemble on their ships and launch a second attack, but the second attack never came.

[Marathon tumulus]
Burial mound of the Athenian soldiers at Marathon. (Image: Battles of the Ancients.)

This battle took place in 490 B.C., and the century that followed is what we now think of as the Golden Age of Greek literature, art, and science. If the Persians had won at Marathon and Athens had fallen, all of mainland Greece would probably have fallen in turn. All that came after — Socrates and Plato, Sophocles and all the Greek playwrights, the art and architecture of Classical Greece, the science and philosophy of Aristotle and his successors — all might never have appeared. (“What-if” history is always speculation, but it’s good for your students’ imaginations even so.)

The American essayist Guy Davenport wrote a wonderful modern poem about the importance of remembering Marathon, using fellow-poet and former teacher Marianne Moore (1887–1972) as his example. Moore, who had lived for many years in Brooklyn, New York, made a pilgrimage to Marathon in her old age to pay tribute to the Athenian army.

At Marathon

Marianne Moore saluted the battlefield.
Her frail hand at the brim of her hat
round as a platter, she stood at attention
in her best Brooklyn Navy Yard manner,
or as years before she and Jim Thorpe
raised the school flag at Carlisle.
Here in long scarlet cloaks the ranks
advanced with ashlared shields, singing
to the thrashed drums and squealing fife
the pitiless hymn of Apollo the Wolf,
spears forward, horsetails streaming
from the masked helmets with unearthly eyes.
The swordline next and the javelineers,
More red cloaks, Ares wild in their blades.
The javelins whistled up like partridges
flushed in a brake and fell like sleet.
The Persians bored in, an auger of hornets.
The Greeks flowed around their thrust
as fire eats a stick. Wise to the ruse,
the Persians pulled back to the sea
and made hard in their ships for Athens,
which, the Greek army there on the plain,
lay naked to their will, tomorrow’s victory.
But the Greeks were there on the morrow
to cut them back. They had run all the way
from Marathon, twenty miles, in bronze.
Two thousand, four hundred and fifty-five
years ago. There are things one must not
leave undone, such as coming from Brooklyn
in one’s old age to salute the army
at Marathon. What are years?

Perhaps you and your students, like Marianne Moore, will visit the Plain of Marathon someday to give a salute of your own. The Athenian soldiers are still there. Although it was generally the custom in Greece to return war casualties to their home city for burial, the victory at Marathon was deemed so important that in Homeric fashion, the Athenians raised a great burial mound and interred their fallen comrades on the field where they fell, and there they remain today.

What are years?

❡ Come, here’s the map: Be sure to track down the location of Marathon in your recommended world atlas (riverhouses.org/books) — you’ll find it on plate 72, marked by the standard ⚔️ symbol used on most maps for historic battle sites. (Have your students discovered all the information that is packed into map symbols?) Your recommended history encyclopedia also has a well-illustrated spread on the conflicts between Greece and the Persian Empire on pages 92–93. 🌍

❡ Follow along with us: This is one of our occasional Homeschool Holidays & Anniversaries posts. Add your name to our free weekly mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🗞

🇦🇴 WEEKLY WORLD HERITAGE: Mbanza Kongo in Angola

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-mbanza-kongo

(Welcome to a new homeschool year and a new tour of World Heritage Sites around the globe! Print a copy of our River Houses World Heritage Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us every Wednesday.)

Angola in southwest Africa is one of our homeschool countries-of-the-week, so why not spend a few minutes today learning about one of Angola’s World Heritage Sites: Mbanza Kongo, the Capital of the Former Kingdom of Kongo.

Remains of the Cathedral of the Holy Savior of Congo in Angola. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

Mbanza Kongo was the royal center of the regional Kilukeni dynasty during the 1400s, and then a focal point of Portuguese contact and settlement from the late 1400s onward.

“The town of Mbanza Kongo, located on a plateau at an altitude of 570 m, was the political and spiritual capital of the Kingdom of Kongo, one of the largest constituted states in Southern Africa from the 14th to 19th centuries. The historical area grew around the royal residence, the customary court and the holy tree, as well as the royal funeral places. When the Portuguese arrived in the 15th century they added stone buildings constructed in accordance with European methods to the existing conurbation built in local materials. Mbanza Kongo illustrates, more than anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa, the profound changes caused by the introduction of Christianity and the arrival of the Portuguese into Central Africa.“ (UNESCO World Heritage Centre #1151)

Mbanza Kongo was added to the World Heritage List in 2017.

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 post 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 UNESCO World Heritage Centre also has a free and comprehensive World Heritage education kit for teachers and 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 week? 😊

❡ 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 745–852; 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 UNESCO’s one-paragraph 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 historic sites of international importance. Download your own 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 free weekly mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 🌍

🇺🇸 REMEMBERING 9/11

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-nine-eleven

Many homeschoolers this week will be looking for ways to remember and teach about the 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 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.

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The words of our national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” were written in 1814 by Francis Scott Key on that 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 492 of your homeschool almanac (riverhouses.org/books) 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 anniversaries will you be marking in your homeschool this week?

❡ Explore more: The complete hour-long memorial service from St. Paul’s Cathedral in London on September 14th, 2001, is available from C-SPAN online.

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

📚 LEARNING THE LIBRARY: Finding Local Libraries With WorldCat

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-worldcat

Tuesday is our regular Books & Libraries Day in the River Houses, and on the several Tuesdays of September — the first month of the new school year — we (re)introduce some of the general library resources that we recommend to all homeschoolers. Last week we started our annual tour of the Dewey Decimal system, and next week and the week after we’ll invite you and your students to visit the Library of Congress and the National Archives.

This week we ask: have you found all the libraries in your local area? There may be more than you realize!

Many homeschooling families make a tradition out of regular trips to the local library, whether weekly, or monthly, or for some (it may feel like) daily! But are you sure you know all the libraries in your area that could be useful to you and your students?

[WorldCat logo]WorldCat (worldcat.org) is the online global service that provides access to the individual collection catalogs of thousands of local libraries all around the world, public and private, large and small. WorldCat also has a Library Finder feature that will let you type in a location and receive a list of all the libraries in that area. In the United States, I’ve found that the search works best using a zip code — why not give it a try:

For example, if you live in Boise, Idaho, and enter your zip code of 83701, you’ll find that there are more than 100 school, college, and specialty libraries listed in your area, from the Pepper Ridge Elementary School Library, to the Brown Mackie College Library, to the Meridian Idaho East Family History Center Library.

[National Union Catalog]
Before WorldCat, the 750 volumes of the National Union Catalog were the only way to discover which libraries had copies of a given book. Not surprisingly, the NUC was generally available only in the largest libraries: it takes up 130 feet of shelf space and weighs three tons. 😮 (Image: Karin Dalziel.)

It may well be that your local town library is the only one near you, especially if you live in a remote area. But you may also discover, for example, that a local hospital has a medical library that could help a homeschool science student, or that a local courthouse has a specialty law library that would be suitable for a social studies project. There may also be small college and technical school libraries in your area that you haven’t yet explored.

Not all these specialized libraries will be open to the public or will have regular hours, of course. But the WorldCat Library Finder will generally give you a street location and contact information for each collection, and if you call and ask whether a local homeschool student could use their facilities for a special project, you might receive a pleasantly positive answer.

Give the WorldCat Library Finder a try and make a list of new libraries to explore in the homeschool year ahead.

What educational discoveries have you made at your library lately? 😊

❡ Books in the running brooks: The sidebar on the River Houses website (riverhouses.org) has links to several important online library collections that we like to explore, as well as permanent links to WorldCat and the WorldCat Library Finder. Why not sit yourself down at a large screen for a while (rather than a phone) and give them a browse. 😊

❡ 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. 📚

🦋 WONDERFUL WORDS: “The Tuft of Flowers”

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-frost

Our River Houses poetry calendar for the 2019–2020 homeschool year is now available on our main calendar page (riverhouses.org/calendars). It’s a collection of forty-eight friends we get to know over the course of the year, and we invite you and your students to join us! Our poem for this second week of September, as summer begins changing to autumn, is Robert Frost’s “The Tuft of Flowers.”

Frost is a wonderful poet for younger people because his poems are generally well structured and use direct language. “The Tuft of Flowers” is a poem about mowing a field, and its characters are two farmhands and a butterfly. The first farmhand is the narrator; the second farmhand is “off stage” and never appears, although we learn something about him by seeing the work he has done; and the butterfly — the butterfly is the character who brings the two farmhands together.

The Tuft of Flowers

I went to turn the grass once after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.

The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the levelled scene.

I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been, — alone,

‘As all must be,’ I said within my heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart.’

But as I said it, swift there passed me by
On noiseless wing a ’wildered butterfly,

Seeking with memories grown dim o’er night
Some resting flower of yesterday’s delight.

And once I marked his flight go round and round,
As where some flower lay withering on the ground.

And then he flew as far as eye could see,
And then on tremulous wing came back to me.

I thought of questions that have no reply,
And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;

But he turned first, and led my eye to look
At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.

I left my place to know them by their name,
Finding them butterfly weed when I came.

The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,

Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him,
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,

That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,

And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;

But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.

‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart.’

Frost is always a careful observer, and his details are precise. Have your students ever watched someone mow a field with a scythe? The video below demonstrates the process very well. The man in this scene is performing the first step, which the poem’s “off-stage” character performed at dawn before the narrator arrived: he is cutting the grass and leaving it in rows. Either he or someone else will come back later to turn the rows over so the cut grass will dry and not rot:

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“I listened for his whetstone on the breeze,” says Frost. Skip ahead in the video to the 2:25 mark and you’ll hear exactly what that sounded like (along with some “wakening birds around”).

“I left my place to know them [the flowers] by their name, / Finding them butterfly weed when I came.” Is “butterfly weed” an imaginary invention? Not at all. Asclepias tuberosa (butterfly weed) is a common field-flower of the northeastern United States that is particularly attractive to butterflies.

[Butterfly Weed]
The tuft of flowers that Frost’s mowers saw: butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa). (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

It’s now late summer, grading into autumn, and in many parts of the United States the Monarch butterfly migration is underway — I’ve probably seen at least twenty in the last couple of days. Perhaps you can find a few Monarchs in an open field near you this week and trace the paths they take on tremulous wing. Who knows where they may lead you. 🦋

What wonderful words have you found and what literary discoveries have you made in your homeschool lately? 😊

❡ Making a new friend: When you introduce your students to a new poem, especially one 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 several meetings to get acquainted. Before you even start to think 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 (ABAB, AABA, ABCD, or something else)? By uncovering these details of structure your students will come to appreciate good poems as carefully crafted pieces of literary labor. 🖋

❡ Whether they work together or apart: 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. 😊

❡ Looking in the lexicon: There’s some good vocabulary in this week’s poem to look up in your family dictionary (riverhouses.org/books): whetstone, tremulous, and scythe. Send your students to the dictionary also for any poetical terminology they encounter: stanza, couplet, quatrain, sonnet, pentameter, hexameter, iambic, dactylic, and more — wonderful words, every one! 😊

❡ Explore more: The website of the Poetry Foundation includes biographical notes and examples of the work of many important poets (including Robert Frost) that are suitable for high school students and homeschool teachers. 🖋

❡ Here, said the year: This post is one of our regular homeschool poems-of-the-week. Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us as we visit forty-eight of our favorite friends. 📖

🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 8 September 2019

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For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-09-08

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 (riverhouses.org/calendars) and print your own homeschool calendars for the entire year.

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Pennsylvania, and our COUNTRIES are Angola 🇦🇴, Antigua and Barbuda 🇦🇬, Argentina 🇦🇷, and Armenia 🇦🇲. (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 waxing, heading toward full on the 14th. You can explore the constellations and the features of the moon in your recommended backyard star guide and your homeschool world atlas, and you can learn many more stellar and lunar facts on pages 342–357 in your almanac (riverhouses.org/books).

🗓 TODAY (Sunday, 8 September 2019) — Today is the 251st day of 2019; there are 114 days remaining in the year. Learn more about different kinds of modern and historical calendars on pages 358–364 in your River Houses almanac (riverhouses.org/books). 📚 Today is one of the most important anniversaries in American cultural history. On this day in 1966, the first episode of Star Trek, “The Man Trap,” was broadcast on NBC television. 😊 🚀 🖖 Our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the second week of September is Robert Frost’s “The Tuft of Flowers,” for the fall harvest, our common labor, and the Monarch butterfly migration. 🦋 Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us throughout the year. 🖋

Monday (9 September 2019) — Today is the birthday of the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910). 📚 It’s also the birthday of Harland David Sanders (1890–1980), better known as Colonel Sanders, the founder of the Kentucky Fried Chicken chain of restaurants. 🍗

Tuesday (10 September 2019) — 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. ⚡

Wednesday (11 September 2019) — Today is the 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. 🌍

Thursday (12 September 2019) — 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.” 🚀 🌕

Friday (13 September 2019) — Today is the birthday of the German composer and pianist Clara Schumann (1819–1896). 🎵 It’s also the birthday of the British novelist, fighter pilot, and children’s author Roald Dahl (1916–1990). 🖋

Saturday (14 September 2019) — On this day in 1814 during the British bombardment of Baltimore, Francis Scott Key wrote a poem that he called “Defence of Fort M’Henry.” We know it today as “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the national anthem of the United States. 🇺🇸 The moon is full tonight, which means we’ll have a report on student research opportunities from the River Houses Lunar Society (riverhouses.org/lunar). 🌕 And since this is the second Saturday of the month, we’ll introduce you to one of the Great Stars of the northern hemisphere night sky. This month: Deneb, the brightest star in the constellation Cygnus (the namesake of our current Cygnus Term, of course). 🌟

Sunday (15 September 2019) — Today is the birthday of novelist James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), one of the most popular writers of nineteenth-century America. 🖋 It’s also the birthday of writer and illustrator Robert McCloskey (1914–2003), author of Make Way for Ducklings (1941) and other children’s classics. 🦆

🥂 OUR WEEKLY TOAST, for the work of the new school year: “Not the laurel, but the race; / Not the quarry, but the chase.”

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

🌍 EVERYTHING FLOWS: Angola is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Cunene or Kunene River, which forms part of the border between Angola and Namibia. You can chart its course in your recommended homeschool atlas (riverhouses.org/books), and you can read more about it in the Cunene River entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

The Cunene (Kunene) River in Angola. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

❡ Let the river run: 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 691–693), and make it a project to look them all up in your atlas, or in a handy encyclopedia either online or on a weekly visit to your local library. A whole world of geographical learning awaits you. 🌍

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

❡ Lively springs: This is one of our regular “Quick Freshes” posts looking at the homeschool week ahead. Add your name to our River Houses mailing list (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. 🗓