🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 10 March 2024

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. Add your name to our free mailing list 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.

🌏 🌑 🌞 A TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE will be coming up on Monday, April 8th, and the band of totality will pass right across North America. If you live anywhere near that path it will be worth traveling to see it; people in other areas are guaranteed a partial eclipse (weather permitting). Mark your calendars now and get the details right here.

🇺🇸 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 new — that’s the best time of the month for dark-sky stargazing! You can explore the night sky 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 (10 March 2024) — Today is the 70th day of 2024; there are 296 days remaining in this leap year. Learn more about different modern and historical calendars on pages 349–355 in your recommended world almanac. 📚 Daylight Saving Time begins this morning (the second Sunday in March) in most U.S. jurisdictions at 2:00 a.m., when you should set your clocks ahead to 3:00 a.m. 🕑 ↻ 🕒 And on this day in 1804, a formal ceremony was held in St. Louis, Missouri, to complete the Louisiana Purchase. 🇪🇸 🇫🇷 🇺🇸

Monday (11 March 2024) — 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). 🖥

Tuesday (12 March 2024) — 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. 🍪 ☘️

Wednesday (13 March 2024) — 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. 👽 And our Wednesday tour of World Heritage Sites this week will take you to Aapravasi Ghat in Mauritius. 🇲🇺

Thursday (14 March 2024) — 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. ⚛️

Friday (15 March 2024) — 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. 🏛 Our Friday Bird Families post this week will introduce you to the garrulous Crows and Jays. Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦅 And speaking of bewaring, our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the third week of March is “The Ides of March” by the modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933), for, um, the Ides of March! Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us throughout the year. 🗡

Saturday (16 March 2024) — Today is the birthday of James Madison (1751–1836), “the Father of the Constitution” and the 4th President of the United States. 🇺🇸 And on this day in 1926 in a field in Auburn, Massachusetts, Robert Goddard (1882–1945) launched the first experimental liquid-fueled rocket. 🚀

Sunday (17 March 2024) — Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Erin go Bragh! (Ireland forever!) ☘️ And happy first day of National Surveyors Week! 🧭 On this day in 1776, British forces evacuated Boston after eleven months of siege. It was George Washington’s first victory in the American Revolution. 🇺🇸 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: Mauritius in the Indian Ocean is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is Chamarel Falls, one of the highlights of that island-nation’s Black River Gorges National Park. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Chamarel village 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, or start with the river lists in the “World Exploration and 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 Wednesday this month!

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 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. 🏡