🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 25 May 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.

🦁 🗓 💪 This is the last week of LEO TERM, our spring term in the River Houses. HERCULES TERM, our summer term, begins next Sunday, the first of June.

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is North Dakota, and our COUNTRIES are Senegal 🇸🇳, Serbia 🇷🇸, Seychelles 🇸🇨, and Sierra Leone 🇸🇱. (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 waning 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 adverb quasi, which means as if. Write it on your homeschool blackboard and send your students to your family dictionary to see how many related English words they can find. (Quasi is often used as an English prefix to indicate incompleteness or partial similarity: quasi-legal, quasi-national, quasi-religious.)

🗓 TODAY, Sunday (25 May 2025) — Today is the 145th day of 2025; there are 220 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 great American poet, essayist, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). 🖋 And on this day in 1977, the first Star Wars movie was released! 🚀

Monday (26 May 2025) — Today (the last Monday in May) is Memorial Day in the United States, the day we remember the nation’s war dead. 🇺🇸

Tuesday (27 May 2025) — Today is the birthday of the American poet and songwriter Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910), author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (“Mine eyes have seen the glory”). 🌅 🍇 🎺 ⚡️ ⚔️

Wednesday (28 May 2025) — A solar eclipse occurred on this day in the year 585 B.C. during the Battle of the Halys River in central Anatolia (modern Turkey), leading to a truce. The exact date of that eclipse is one of the key reference points from which other dates in ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern history are calculated. 🌏 🌑 🌞 Our Wednesday tour of American Heritage Sites this week will take you to Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site in North Dakota. 🇺🇸

Thursday (29 May 2025) — On this day in 1453, the city of Constantinople fell to the Ottoman armies of Sultan Mehmed II after a 53-day siege, bringing to an end the ancient Byzantine Empire that had survived for more than a thousand years. You can explore more on pages 198, 206, and 246 in your homeschool history encyclopedia. ⚔️ And speaking of eclipses, another solar eclipse, occurring on this day in 1919, allowed Sir Arthur Eddington to confirm Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. 🌏 🌑 🌞 And on this day in 1953, mountaineers Edmund Hillary and Tenzig Norgay became the first climbers ever to reach the summit of Mount Everest. 🏔

Friday (30 May 2025) — The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., was dedicated on this day in the year 1922. 🏛 Today is also the birthday of the great voice actor Mel Blanc (1908–1989), “the man of a thousand voices,” who gave us Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety Bird, Sylvester the Cat, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, Marvin the Martian, Pepé Le Pew, Speedy Gonzales, Wile E. Coyote, Road Runner, and even the Tasmanian Devil. 🐰 And our Friday Bird Families lesson this week will introduce you to the Indigobirds, Whydahs, Weavers, Estrildid Finches, and Old World Sparrows. Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦅

Saturday (31 May 2025) — Today is the last day of Leo Term and the last day of the River Houses academic year. Hercules Term, our summer term, begins tomorrow. 🎓 Today is also the birthday of the great American poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892), who contained multitudes. 🔭

🗓 💪 Hercules Term 2025 Begins

Sunday (1 June 2025) — Today is the first day of HERCULES TERM, our summer term in the River Houses, named for the Great Hero of the Heavens. 💪 Today is also the birthday of the great English poet of the sea John Masefield (1878–1967), author of the finest thing Herman Melville never said. ⚓️ Our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the first week of June is the anonymous medieval song “Sumer is i-cumin in,” for the beginning of Hercules Term. Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us throughout the year. ⛱ And our Sunday States & Countries for next week will be South Dakota 🇺🇸, Singapore 🇸🇬, Slovakia 🇸🇰, Slovenia 🇸🇮, and the Solomon Islands 🇸🇧.

🥂 🎓 THIS WEEK’S TOAST is our traditional offering for all who may be completing their homeschool studies at the end of this school year: The teacher begins: “A handsome house to lodge a friend.” The graduating student responds: “A river at my garden’s end.” And the teacher offers one last lesson: “And beyond, a world.”

❡ 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: Senegal in western Africa is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Saloum River, which flows west through Senegal and empties into the Atlantic Ocean. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Saloum 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! 🗓

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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. 🏡