🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 9 March 2025

➤ Eclipse! There will be a Total Lunar Eclipse coming up on the night of 13–14 March 2025 (Thursday–Friday). It will be visible across all of North America and in many other places as well. Get all the details on the timeanddate.com eclipse page and make a viewing plan for your homeschool today! 🌞 🌏 🌕

➤ Spring ahead! Daylight Saving Time begins in most U.S. jurisdictions at 2:00 a.m. on the second Sunday in March (that’s today, 9 March 2025). You should set your clocks forward one hour from 2:00 a.m. to 3:00 a.m. 🕑 ↻ 🕒

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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.

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Texas, and our COUNTRIES are Malta 🇲🇹, the Marshall Islands 🇲🇭, Mauritania 🇲🇷, and Mauritius 🇲🇺. (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 — a good time for moon watching! 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 locus, which means place or region. Write it on your homeschool blackboard and send your students to your family dictionary to see how many related English words they can find. (Local, locate, location, locus in genetics, and more!)

🗓 TODAY, Sunday (9 March 2025) — Today is the 68th day of 2025; there are 297 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 the birthday of the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512), the father of “America.” 🌎 It’s also the birthday of the great American composer and pianist Samuel Barber (1910–1981). 🎼

Monday (10 March 2025) — On this day in 1804, a formal ceremony was held in St. Louis, Missouri, to complete the Louisiana Purchase. 🇪🇸 🇫🇷 🇺🇸

Tuesday (11 March 2025) — Today is the birthday of Vannevar Bush (1890–1974), one of the pioneering thinkers of the early computer age, who envisioned something like the World Wide Web all the way back in 1945 (he called it Memex). 🖥

Wednesday (12 March 2025) — Today is the birthday of British antiquarian John Aubrey (1626–1697), a pioneer in the study of Stonehenge and other ancient megalithic monuments. 🌅 Today is also “Girl Scouts’ Birthday,” commemorating the establishment of the first American girl scout troop by Juliette Gordon Low in Savannah, Georgia, in 1912. 🍪 ☘️ And our Wednesday tour of American Heritage Sites this week will take you to San Antonio Missions National Historical Park in Texas. 🇺🇸

Thursday (13 March 2025) — Today is the birthday of the American businessman, mathematician, and astronomer Percival Lowell (1855–1916), who inspired generations of science-fiction writers with his (mistaken) claim that there was an extensive network of canals on the surface of Mars. 👽

Friday (14 March 2025) — Happy 𝝿 Day! (3/14, that is.) 🥧 And happy birthday also to the great German-Swiss-American physicist Albert Einstein (1879–1955). Learn more about him on pages 416–417 in your homeschool history encyclopedia. ⚛️ Our Friday Bird Families lesson this week will introduce you to the predatory Shrikes and the voluble Vireos. Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦅 And, there’s a full moon this morning (and an eclipse!), so that means we’ll have a report from the Lunar Society of the River Houses on the many wonderful citizen-science projects that are available to homeschool students. 🌕

Saturday (15 March 2025) — Beware the Ides of March! 🗡 On the ancient Roman calendar, the 15th of March is called the “Ides” or midpoint of the month. On the Ides of March in 44 B.C., the dictator Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by Marcus Junius Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus, and several other Roman senators. Their ultimately unsuccessful coup led to the consolidation of the Roman state as an empire under Caesar’s successors and its decline as a republic. 🏛

Sunday (16 March 2025) — Today is the birthday of James Madison (1751–1836), “the Father of the Constitution” and the 4th President of the United States. 🇺🇸 On this day in 1926 in a field in Auburn, Massachusetts, Robert Goddard (1882–1945) launched the first experimental liquid-fueled rocket. 🚀 And our Sunday States & Countries for next week will be Iowa 🇺🇸, Mexico 🇲🇽, Micronesia 🇫🇲, Moldova 🇲🇩, and Monaco 🇲🇨.

🥂 🎂 OUR WEEKLY TOAST is in honor of Einstein’s birthday: “Here’s to the clever: may they be with us ever.”

❡ 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: The Mediterranean island of Malta is one of our countries-of-the-week, but as a small island-nation, it doesn’t have any true rivers. It does have quite a few valleys with intermittent streams and marshes, however, so our Weekly World River is Malta’s marshy Pwales Valley (Wied tal-Pwales). You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Pwales Valley 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. 🌎 🌍 🌏

🙀 AND DON’T FORGET: Friday the 13th comes on a Thursday this month!

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. 🏡