🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 5 January 2024 2025!

Quick Freshes is our regular Sunday almanac for the homeschool week ahead. Pick one or two (or more!) of the items below each week and use them to enrich your homeschooling schedule. Subscribe to our free homeschool newsletter to get posts like these delivered right to your mailbox each week. Visit our River Houses calendar page to print your own homeschool calendars and planners for the entire year.

📖 Have you gotten your new WORLD ALMANAC for the new 2025 year? It’s one of the handiest educational reference books you can have in a homeschool library.

🎵 🎄 OUR HOMESCHOOL HOLIDAY MUSIC MONTH concludes today, the Twelfth Day of Christmas, with two classics: one American and one Shakespearean. For the past four weeks we have been sharing an assortment of seasonal favorites — classical and modern, sacred and secular, serious and silly — along with a collection of easy educational notes to help you teach little musical lessons all along the way. Don’t miss today’s Grand Finale! 🍐🌳

🦦 HORACE THE OTTER says your LATIN word for the week is the noun gloria, which means fame or glory. Write it on your homeschool blackboard and send your students to your family dictionary to see how many related English words they can find. (Glory, glorify, inglorious, vainglorious, and more!)

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Indiana, and our COUNTRIES are Haiti 🇭🇹, Honduras 🇭🇳, Hungary 🇭🇺, and Iceland 🇮🇸. (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 a waxing crescent — a good time for stargazing! You can explore the solar system and the features of the moon in your backyard astronomy guide and your homeschool world atlas, and you can learn a host of stellar and lunar facts in the Astronomy section your current world almanac. Browse through our regular homeschool astronomy posts for even more.

🗓 TODAY, Sunday (5 January 2025) — Today is the 5th day of 2025; there are 360 days remaining in this common year. Learn more about different modern and historical calendars in the Science & Technology section in your (brand new 2025!) River Houses almanac. 📚 Today is the also Twelfth Day of Christmas and tonight is Twelfth Night, and that means it’s the end of our Holiday Music Month — and you know what song we’ll be going out with. 🍐🌳

Monday (6 January 2025) — Today is the birthday of the American poet Carl Sandburg (1878–1967). 🖋

Tuesday (7 January 2025) — On this day in 1610, Galileo Galilei first reported that he had discovered several previously unknown moons orbiting the planet Jupiter — we now call them the Galilean moons: Ganymede, Callisto, Io, and Europa. You can see them from your own backyard with almost any small telescope. 🔭 Today is also the birthday of the African-American writer and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960). 🖋 And since this is the first Tuesday of the month, today we’ll invite you to browse a new Dewey Decimal class with your students on your next visit to your local library. This month: the Social 300s. 📚

Wednesday (8 January 2025) — Today is the birthday of two great British scientists: the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), co-discoverer with Charles Darwin of the principle of natural selection, and the physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking (1942–2018). 🦋 🌌 And in another sphere of human accomplishment, today is also the birthday of Elvis Presley (1935–1977)! 🎸 Our homeschool poem-of-the-week for second week of January is Gail Mazur’s “Ice,” for homeschool dads and all wintertime learners. Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us throughout the new year. ⛸ And our Wednesday tour of American Heritage Sites this week will take you to George Rogers Clark National Historical Park in Indiana. 🇺🇸

Thursday (9 January 2025) — On this day in 1923, Spanish engineer Juan de la Cierva made the first successful flight in an autogyro, the ancestor of the modern helicopter. 🚁

Friday (10 January 2025) — On this day in the year 49 B.C., Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon river and approached the city of Rome with his army, touching off a civil war that led to the destruction of the Roman Republic and the eventual formation of the Roman Empire. For an illustrated overview of the life and times of Julius Caesar and his outsized impact on the Western world, see pages 108–109 in your homeschool history encyclopedia. ⚔️ Our Friday Bird Families lesson this week will introduce you to the Storks, Frigatebirds, Boobies, Gannets, Cormorants, Darters, and Pelicans. Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦅

Saturday (11 January 2025) — Today is the birthday of Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804), the first United States Secretary of the Treasury, whose portrait appears on our $10 bills. 💵 It’s also the birthday of William James (1842–1910), one of the founders of the modern field of psychology. 🧠 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: Capella, the brightest star in the constellation Auriga the Charioteer. 🌟

Sunday (12 January 2025) — Today is the birthday of the French author Charles Perrault (1628–1703), who gave the world Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, and many other beloved fairy tales. 🛌 It’s also the birthday of the American writer Jack London (1876–1916). 🐺 And our Sunday States & Countries for next week will be Mississippi 🇺🇸, India 🇮🇳, Indonesia 🇮🇩, Iran 🇮🇷, and Iraq 🇮🇶.

🥂 ❄️ OUR WEEKLY TOAST is a New Year’s traditional: “May every new year bring us new joys.”

❡ Toasts can be a wonderful educational tradition for your homeschool lunch or dinner 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 in your homeschool this week? 🥂

🌎 🇮🇸 EVERYTHING FLOWS: Iceland in the northern Atlantic Ocean is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Þjórsá (Thjorsa) River, Iceland’s longest river. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Þjórsá River entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.

❡ 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 the World Exploration & Geography section of your world almanac, 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 and your students have planned for your homeschool this week, this month, and this wonderful new year? 😊

❡ Lively springs: This is one of our regular “Quick Freshes” posts looking at the homeschool week ahead. Add your name to our River Houses mailing list and get these weekly messages delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. 📫

❡ Homeschool calendars: We have a whole collection of free, printable, educational homeschool calendars and planners available on our main River Houses calendar page. They will help you create a light and easy structure for your homeschool year. Give them a try today! 🗓

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❡ Join us! The aim of the River Houses project is to create a network of friendly local homeschool support groups — local chapters that we call “Houses.” Our first at-large chapter, Headwaters House, is now forming and is open to homeschoolers everywhere. Find out how to become one of our founding members on the Headwaters House membership page. 🏡