🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 30 June 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. Subscribe to our free homeschool newsletter to get posts like these delivered right to your mailbox once each week. Visit our River Houses calendar page to print your own homeschool calendars and planners for the entire year. (Our new calendars for the 2024–2025 homeschool year are now available!)

📺 One of the best ways to spend your SUMMER educational time is by watching good quality historical DOCUMENTARIES and discussing them as a family. Take a look at our recommended list and see if you can fit one or two of them into your schedule.

🌘 JULY is our special MOON MONTH in the River Houses, in honor of the July 20th anniversary of the first moon landing in 1969. 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.

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Wyoming, and our COUNTRIES are Tanzania 🇹🇿, Thailand 🇹🇭, Timor-Leste (East Timor) 🇹🇱, and Togo 🇹🇬. (Our separate Sunday States & Countries post for the week went up just a few minutes ago.)

🗓 TODAY, Sunday (30 June 2024) — Today is the 182nd day of 2024; there are 184 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 World Asteroid Day, marking the anniversary of the 1908 Tunguska Event when a meteoroid perhaps as much as 600 feet long exploded in the atmosphere and flattened more than 700 square miles of forest in Siberia. 🌠

Monday (1 July 2024) — Midnight tonight (1–2 July) is the mid-point of this leap year: 183 days have passed, and 183 days remain. 🗓 Today is the birthday of the great German mathematician and polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). 🧠 It’s also the birthday of the German–Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis (1818–1865), “the savior of mothers,” who discovered that deaths from childbed fever could be dramatically reduced by requiring physicians delivering babies to wash their hands. 🚿 On this day in 1863, the Civil War Battle of Gettysburg began. Over three days of fighting, Union and Confederate forces suffered more than 40,000 casualties. ⚔️ And the devastating World War I Battle of the Somme began on this day in 1916. ⚔️ More hopefully, our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the first week of July is William Ralph Emerson’s American anthem “A Nation’s Strength,” for Independence Day. Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us throughout the year. 🇺🇸

Tuesday (2 July 2024) — On this day in 1776, the Continental Congress passed the Lee Resolution, declaring the Thirteen Colonies independent of Great Britain. 🇺🇸 Today is also the birthday of Thurgood Marshall (1908–1993), the first African-American appointed to the United States Supreme Court. ‍⚖️ The first Walmart store opened on this day in 1962 in Rogers, Arkansas! 🛒 And since this is the first Tuesday of the month, today we’ll invite you to browse a new Dewey Decimal class with your students on your next visit to your local library. This month: the Historical and Geographical 900s. (We’re almost done!) 📚

Wednesday (3 July 2024) — On this day in 1775, on orders from the Continental Congress and a year before Independence was declared, George Washington took command of the thousands of New England militiamen encamped outside of Boston, and the Continental Army was born. 🇺🇸 Today is the birthday of the early American painter John Singleton Copley (1738–1815), who memorialized many prominent figures of the American Revolutionary period. 🎨 And today is also the birthday of the American songwriter, actor, and Yankee Doodle Dandy George M. Cohan (1872–1942). 🎵 One of the most mysterious archeological objects in the world, the Phaistos Disk, was discovered on this day in 1908 in the ancient Minoan palace of Phaistos on Crete. Believed to be about 3500 years old, it is covered with a spiral of stamped symbols that appear to represent an unknown form of writing. You can learn more about the Minoan civilization that produced the Phaistos disk (and see a picture of it) on page 76 of your River Houses history encyclopedia. 🐬 And our Wednesday tour of World Heritage Sites this week will take you to Koutammakou, the Land of the Batammariba in Togo. 🇹🇬

Thursday (4 July 2024) — HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY! 🎆 On this day in 1776, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. 🇺🇸 And on this day in 1802, the United States Military Academy opened at West Point, New York. ⚔️ The great American novelist and short-story writer Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on this day in 1804. 🖋 On this day in 1826, on the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson died in Virginia and John Adams died in Massachusetts. 🇺🇸 And on this day in 1872, Calvin Coolidge, the 30th President of the United States, was born in Plymouth Notch, Vermont. ⛰

Friday (5 July 2024) — One of the most famous books in the history of science, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), was published in London on this day in 1687. 📖 And somewhat less sublime: the canned luncheon meat SPAM was first introduced to the American market on this day in 1937! 🍽 Our Friday Bird Families lesson this week will introduce you to the familiar Emberizid Sparrows (Part I). Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦅

Saturday (6 July 2024) — In one of the great setbacks of the early phase of the American Revolution, British General John Burgoyne forced American troops to abandon Fort Ticonderoga on the New York–Vermont border on this day in 1777. ⚔️ 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 (7 July 2024) — Today is the birthday of the great Austrian composer Gustav Mahler (1860–1911). 🎼 On this day in 1928, sliced bread was sold for the first time by the Chillicothe Baking Company in Missouri. It was the greatest thing since, um, sliced bread! 🍞 And our Sunday States & Countries for next week will be Utah 🇺🇸, Tonga 🇹🇴, Trinidad & Tobago 🇹🇹, Tunisia 🇹🇳, and Turkey 🇹🇷.

🥂 📜 THIS WEEK’S TOAST is one of our old traditional offerings for Independence Day. It goes back at least as far as 1853:

To the memory of the man
That owned the land,
That raised the corn,
That fed the goose,
That bore the quill,
That made the pen,
That wrote the Declaration of Independence.

❡ 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: Thailand in southeast Asia is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Chao Phraya River, the principal river of Thailand. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Chao Phraya 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 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. 🏡