🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 13 July 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. (Our new calendars for the 2025–2026 homeschool year are also now available!)

🌕 JULY is our special MOON MONTH in the River Houses! Why not explore some of the wonderful Apollo 11 moon landing resources that are available to your students this month (and every month of the year).

📺 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 summer schedule.

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Oklahoma, and our COUNTRIES are Turkmenistan 🇹🇲, Tuvalu 🇹🇻, Uganda 🇺🇬, and Ukraine 🇺🇦. (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 waning — 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.

🦦 HORACE THE OTTER says your LATIN word for the week is the verb turbo, which means to disturb or confuse. Write it on your homeschool blackboard and send your students to your family dictionary to see how many related English words they can find. (Dis-turb, turbid, turbulence, and more!)

🗓 TODAY, Sunday (13 July 2025) — Today is the 194th day of 2025; there are 171 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 generally accepted birthdate of the ancient Roman politician, general, and dictator Julius Caesar (100–44 B.C.). 🏛 It’s also the birthday of the great English nature poet John Clare (1793–1864). 🏞

Monday (14 July 2025) — Today is the birthday of the celebrated composer Gerald Finzi (1901–1956), known for his musical settings of many classic English lyric poems. 🎼 And on this day in 2015, the interplanetary space probe New Horizons made its closest approach to Pluto (less than 8000 miles from the surface). ♇

Tuesday (15 July 2025) — Today is the birthday of the great Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669). 🎨 On this day in 1799, near the town of Rashid (Rosetta) in Egypt, a French captain in Napoleon’s army discovered a smooth black stone with a trilingual inscription in hieroglyphs, demotic Egyptian, and Greek. The Rosetta Stone, one of the world’s most famous archeological objects, made it possible to translate ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs for the first time. 🇪🇬 𓅂 And our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the third week of the month is Emily Dickinson’s playful lyric “Answer, July,” for the span of the year. Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us. 🗓

Wednesday (16 July 2025) — Today is the midpoint of Hercules Term and thus one of the four cross-quarter days of the River Houses year. How are things going in your homeschool? 💪 The District of Columbia was established as the capital of the United States on this day in 1790. 🇺🇸 Today is the birthday of the American religious leader Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), founder of the Christian Science movement. ✝️ Today is also the birthday of the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen (1872–1928), leader of the first expedition to reach the South Pole. 🇦🇶 On this day in 1969, the Apollo 11 spacecraft was launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Four days later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to walk on the moon. 🚀 And our Wednesday tour of American Heritage Sites this week will take you to Chickasaw National Recreation Area in Oklahoma. 🇺🇸

Thursday (17 July 2025) — Today is … World Emoji Day! 😎🕴🌎 George Frideric Handel’s masterpiece “Water Music” premiered on this day in 1717, played by fifty musicians on a barge floating down the Thames River in London. 🎵 Today is also the birthday of the great Christian hymn writer and educator Isaac Watts (1674–1748). 🎼

Friday (18 July 2025) — The Great Fire of Rome broke out on this day in the year 64. Over the next six days it destroyed much of the city. Some reports (which may or may not be true) claimed that the Emperor Nero entertained himself by playing the lyre as he watched the city go up in flames. 🔥 On this day in 1863 during the American Civil War, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, a regiment made up almost entirely of African-American soldiers, attempted unsuccessfully to capture Fort Wagner near Charleston, South Carolina. Their story was dramatized in the 1989 film Glory. ⚔️ And our Friday Bird Families lesson this week will introduce you to the familiar and ubiquitous Emberizid Sparrows (Part II). Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦅

Saturday (19 July 2025) — The first national convention on women’s rights, the two-day Seneca Falls Convention, opened on this day in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York. ⚖️

Sunday (20 July 2025) — Today is the birthday of the Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel (1822–1884), the father of modern genetics. 🫛 And on this day in 1969, the Apollo 11 lunar module touched down on the Sea of Tranquility and American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men ever to walk on the moon (while command module pilot Michael Collins continued to orbit overhead). 👨‍🚀👨‍🚀👨‍🚀 🌎 🚀 🌕 👨‍🚀👨‍🚀👨‍🚀 And our Sunday States & Countries for next week will be New Mexico 🇺🇸, the United Arab Emirates 🇦🇪, the United Kingdom 🇬🇧, the United States 🇺🇸, and Uruguay 🇺🇾.

🥂 🚀 OUR TOAST THIS WEEK, from John Masefield’s “Sea Fever,” is one of our traditional annual offerings in honor of the first men to walk on the moon, July 20th, 1969. The host says, “All I ask is a tall ship,” and the guests respond, “and a star to steer her by.”

❡ 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: Ukraine in eastern Europe is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Sula River, an important tributary of the great Dnieper. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Sula 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. 🌎 🌍 🌏

🙀 AND DON’T FORGET: Friday the 13th comes on a Sunday this month!

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. 🏡