🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 27 April 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.

🦅 🦆 🐦 THE UPCOMING MONTH OF MAY is our special Bird Migration Month in the River Houses, and all through May we’ll be sharing an assortment of extra homeschool notes on one of the world’s most wonderful natural phenomena.

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is West Virginia, and our COUNTRIES are Paraguay 🇵🇾, Peru 🇵🇪, the Philippines 🇵🇭, and Poland 🇵🇱. (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 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 oratio, which means a speech or an address. Write it on your homeschool blackboard and send your students to your family dictionary to see how many related English words they can find. (Oration, orator, oratory, and more!)

🗓 TODAY, Sunday (27 April 2025) — Today is the 117th day of 2025; there are 248 days remaining in this common year. Learn more about different modern and historical calendars in the Science & Technology section of your recommended world almanac. 📚 On this day in 1667, John Milton, blind and impoverished, sold the publishing rights to his masterpiece Paradise Lost for £5. 🍎 And today is the birthday of the American artist and inventor Samuel F.B. Morse (1791–1872), the creator of Morse Code. 🎨

Monday (28 April 2025) — Today is the birthday of the American novelist Harper Lee (1926–2016), author of the school-standard story To Kill a Mockingbird. 🖋

Tuesday (29 April 2025) — Today is the birthday of the great American jazz musician and composer Duke Ellington (1899–1974). 🎹

Wednesday (30 April 2025) — On this day in 1789, on the balcony of Federal Hall in New York City, George Washington took the oath of office as the first President of the United States. 🇺🇸 And on this day in 1897, British physicist J. J. Thompson announced the discovery of the electron. ⚛️ Today is also the birthday of the great American musician and conductor Robert Shaw (1916–1999). His professional chorus, The Robert Shaw Chorale, was the sound of America to millions of people around the world. 🎶 And our Wednesday tour of American Heritage Sites this week will take you to Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia. 🇺🇸

Thursday (1 May 2025) — Happy May! 🌼 May is Bird Migration Month in the River Houses. Keep an eye on the season’s progress with the BirdCast website. 🐦 🦆 🦅 The world’s first postage stamp, the Penny Black, was issued on this day in 1840 in the United Kingdom. 📬 On this day in 1931, the Empire State Building was dedicated in New York City as (at the time) the tallest building in the world. 🏙 And our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the first week of May is, naturally enough, “May and the Poets” by Leigh Hunt (1784–1859). Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us throughout the year. 🌼

Friday (2 May 2025) — Peter and the Wolf, the much-loved orchestral work for children by Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953), debuted in Moscow on this day in 1936. 🐺 And our Friday Bird Families lesson this week will introduce you to the Sylviid Warblers, Leaf Warblers, Grasshopper-Warblers, and Old World Flycatchers. Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦅

Saturday (3 May 2025) — Today is the birthday of the famous Italian Renaissance historian and political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527). 👑 On this day in 1715, astronomer Edmund Halley (of comet fame) successfully predicted, to within four minutes’ accuracy, a total solar eclipse that was visible across much of Europe. 🌍 🌑 🌞 And since this is the first Saturday of the month, we’ll post our regular monthly preview today of some of the astronomical events you and your students can watch for over the next few weeks. 🔭

Sunday (4 May 2025) — Happy Star Wars Day! May the Fourth be with you! 🤺 Today is the birthday of the great American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900). 🎨 Today is also International Firefighters Day! 🚒 And our Sunday States & Countries for next week will be Nevada 🇺🇸, Portugal 🇵🇹, Qatar 🇶🇦, Romania 🇷🇴, and Russia 🇷🇺.

🥂 🐑 🌾 THIS WEEK’S TOAST, for all the farmers of the world, is an old traditional for the beginning of the growing season — try offering it with a different person reading each line around the table:

Good luck to the hoof and the horn;
Good luck to the flock and the fleece;
Good luck to the growers of corn;
May they ever have plenty and peace!

❡ 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: Paraguay in central South America is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Paraguay River, a major South American river that flows through Paraguay, Argentina, Bolivia, and Brazil. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Paraguay 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? 😊

❡ 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! 🗓

❡ Support our work: If you enjoy our educational materials, please support us by starting your regular Amazon shopping from our very own homeschool teaching supplies page. When you click through from our page, any purchase you make earns us a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you for helping us to keep going and growing! 🛒

❡ 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. 🏡