🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 26 March 2023

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). Get the details right here and make an observing plan for your homeschool today!

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Wisconsin, and our COUNTRIES are Mongolia 🇲🇳, Montenegro 🇲🇪, Morocco 🇲🇦, and Mozambique 🇲🇿. (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.

🗓 TODAY, Sunday (24 March 2024) — Today is the 84th day of 2024; there are 282 days remaining in this leap year. Learn more about different modern and historical calendars in the Science & Technology section of your recommended world almanac. 📚 Today is also the birthday of the great Victorian artist and designer William Morris (1834–1896). 🖌 And it’s also the birthday of the Hungarian-American magician Harry Houdini (1874–1926). Shazam! 🎩 🐇

Monday (25 March 2024) — Today is the birthday of the American agronomist and Nobel Laureate Norman Borlaug (1914–2009), who may have saved more lives than any human being in history. For some notes on his importance, see pages 464–465 in your River Houses history encyclopedia. 🌽 🌾 Today is also Tolkien Reading Day! 🐉 And, there’s a full moon tonight, so that means we’ll have a report from the Lunar Society of the River Houses on the many independent “citizen science” projects that are available to homeschool students. 🌕

Tuesday (26 March 2024) — On this day in 1812, the Gerrymander was born! 🗳 And on this day in 1830, The Book of Mormon was first published in Palmyra, New York. 📖 Three great writers were also born on this day: A.E. Housman (1859–1936), Robert Frost (1874–1963), and Tennessee Williams (1911–1983). 🖋

Wednesday (27 March 2024) — On this day in 1912, the city of Tokyo, Japan, presented a gift of 3000 cherry trees to the city of Washington, D.C. You can follow their annual flowering at cherryblossomwatch.com. 🌸 And our Wednesday tour of World Heritage Sites this week will take you to the Island of Mozambique. 🇲🇿

Thursday (28 March 2024) — The great Italian Renaissance painter and architect Raphael was born on this day in 1483. 🎨 And today is also the birthday of the Moravian theologian and educator John Amos Comenius (1592–1670), author of Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1658), one of the first-ever picture books for children (wherein we learn that the goose gagleth, the duck quaketh, and the bear grumbleth). 🦆

Friday (29 March 2024) — Today is the birthday of two unrelated Waltons: the English composer William Walton (1902–1983) and the American businessman Sam Walton (1918–1992), the founder of Walmart. 🎵 🛒 And our Friday Bird Families post this week will introduce you to the lovely Larks and Swallows. Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦅

Saturday (30 March 2024) — On this day in 1867, the United States purchased Alaska from the Russian Empire for about two cents an acre. 🏔

Sunday (31 March 2024) — The great French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes was born on this day in 1596. 📈 On this day in 1774, Great Britain ordered the closure of the major trading port of Boston, escalating the tensions that would eventually lead to the American Revolution. 🇬🇧 ⚔️ 🇺🇸 And our Sunday States & Countries for next week will be California 🇺🇸, Myanmar 🇲🇲, Namibia 🇳🇦, Nauru 🇳🇷, and Nepal 🇳🇵.

🥂 OUR WEEKLY TOAST is an old traditional wish: “May honest men be great, and great men honest.”

❡ 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: Morocco in northern Africa is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Ziz River, which rises on the eastern slopes of Morocco’s snow-capped Atlas Mountains and then flows east until it passes into Algeria and vanishes in the Sahara desert. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Ziz 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, 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 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. 🏡