🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 2 February 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.

🖍 COLOR OUR COLLECTIONS WEEK begins Monday! (Tomorrow!) It’s one of the best educational art activities of the year. Start sharpening your pencils and crayons today! (As of this writing, last year’s coloring booklets are still available for downloading too!) (Hmm, it’s now Tuesday and the new CoC coloring booklets don’t seem to be appearing yet. Not sure what’s up.)

🐦 THE GREAT BACKYARD BIRD COUNT is coming up two weekends from now (14–17 February, Washington’s Birthday weekend) all across the country and around the world! It’s one of the best homeschool science activities all year. How many birds will you find in your neighborhood?

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Maine, and our COUNTRIES are Kiribati 🇰🇮, North Korea 🇰🇵, South Korea 🇰🇷, and Kosovo 🇽🇰. (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.

🦦 HORACE THE OTTER says your LATIN word for the week is the noun ignis, which means fire. Write it on your homeschool blackboard and send your students to your family dictionary to see how many related English words they can find. (Ignite, ignition, igneous, and more!)

🗓 TODAY, Sunday (2 February 2025) — Today is the 33rd day of 2025; there are 332 days remaining in this common year. Learn more about different modern and historical calendars in the Science & Technology section of your recommended world almanac. 📚 Today is also Groundhog Day, the historical cross-quarter day between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox. ⏚ 🐖 And on this day in 1653, the city of New Amsterdam was incorporated. We know it today as the city of New York. 🏙

Monday (3 February 2025) — The Soviet Union’s Luna 9 spacecraft made the first-ever soft landing on the moon on this day in 1966. 🚀 And today is the birthday of the popular American painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell (1894–1978). 🎨

Tuesday (4 February 2025) — On this day in 1789, the Electoral College unanimously chose George Washington to be the first President of the United States. 🇺🇸 Today is also the birthday of Joshua Abraham Norton (1818–1880), better known of Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, an American original. 👑 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 Linguistic 400s. 📚

Wednesday (5 February 2025) — The largest gold nugget in history, nicknamed the Welcome Stranger, was discovered in Moliagul, Australia, on this day in 1869. It contained more than 200 pounds of gold. 💰 And our Wednesday tour of American Heritage Sites this week will take you to the Saint Croix Island International Historic Site in Maine. 🇺🇸

Thursday (6 February 2025) — Today is the birthday of baseball great Babe Ruth (1895–1948). ⚾️ And on this day in 1959, Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments filed the first patent for an integrated circuit chip, the component at the heart of nearly all modern electronic devices, including the one you’re using now. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for that work in 2000. 🥇

Friday (7 February 2025) — Today is the birthday of two famous writers: the English novelist Charles Dickens (1812–1870) and the American novelist Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957). 🖋 And our Friday Bird Families lesson this week will introduce you to the tropical Trogons and the piscivorous Kingfishers. Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year.

Saturday (8 February 2025) — The College of William and Mary in Virginia, the second-oldest college in the United States, was chartered on this day in 1683. 🎓 Today is also the birthday of the great Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev (1834–1907), the discoverer of the Periodic Table. ⚗️ Our homeschool poem-of-the-week for second week of February is a youthful amatory lyric from Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), “Awake ye muses nine,” for Valentine’s Day.️ Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us throughout the year. ❤️ 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: Betelgeuse, the brightest star in the constellation Orion the Hunter. 🌟

Sunday (9 February 2025) — Today is the birthday of the English-American political philosopher and revolutionary Thomas Paine (1737–1809). 🇺🇸 It’s also the anniversary of the Great Meteor Procession of 1913. (A close call, perhaps.) 🌠 And our Sunday States & Countries for next week will be Missouri 🇺🇸, Kuwait 🇰🇼, Kyrgyzstan 🇰🇬, Laos 🇱🇦, and Latvia 🇱🇻.

🥂 ⛄️ OUR WEEKLY TOAST, for frigid February, is one of our old traditional offerings: “Here’s to winter – may it always be coaled.”

❡ 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: Kosovo in eastern Europe is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the beautiful White Drin, which flows through Kosovo and northern Albania. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the White Drin 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? 😊

❡ 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. 🏡