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.
๐บ๐ธ OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Arizona, and our COUNTRIES are Uzbekistanย ๐บ๐ฟ, Vanuatuย ๐ป๐บ, Vatican Cityย ๐ป๐ฆ, andย Venezuela ๐ป๐ช. (Our separate Sunday Statesย & Countries post for the week went up just a few minutes ago.)
๐ THE MOON at the beginning of this week is gibbous and waxingย โ aย good time for moon watching! You can explore the night sky and the features of the moon in your recommended backyard astronomy guide and your homeschool world atlas, and you can learn a host of stellar and lunar facts on pages 341โ356 in your current world almanac. Browse through our regular homeschool astronomy posts for even more.
๐ TODAY, Sunday (30 July 2023) โ Today is the 211th day of 2023; there are 254 days remaining in this common year. Learn more about different modern and historical calendars on pages 357โ363 in your recommended world almanac.ย ๐ Today is the birthday of the great (and largely homeschooled) English writer Emily Bronte (1818โ1848), author of Wuthering Heights.ย ๐ It’s also the birthday of the American engineer and industrialist Henry Ford (1863โ1947).ย ๐
Monday (31 July 2023) โ On this day in 1964 the Rangerย 7 probe transmitted the first close-up images of the moon taken by an American spacecraft, just minutes before it was intentionally crash-landed on the lunar surface.ย ๐ย ๐
Tuesday (1 August 2023) โ Today is the birthday of Maria Mitchell (1818โ1889), the discoverer of “Miss Mitchell’s Comet” and the first American woman to work as a professional astronomer.ย โ๏ธ Today is also the birthday of the great American writer Herman Melville (1819โ1891), author of Bartleby the Scrivener, Moby-Dick, and many other literary classics.ย ๐ณ In Melville’s honor, our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the first week of August, and also our weekly toast, is the ringing little toast-poem “To the Master of the Meteor,” appearing below. Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us throughout the year.ย ๐ป This is also the first Tuesday of August, and our regular first-Tuesday tour of the Dewey Decimal classification, from 000 to 999, is now complete! This month, as a final adventure for the current homeschool year, we’re going to go On Beyond Dewey and see what lies there.ย ๐ And if all that is not enough, there’s also a full moon tonight! That means weโll have a report from the River Houses Lunar Society on the many independent “citizen science” projects that are available to homeschool students.ย ๐
Wednesday (2 August 2023) โ The first United States census, conducted under Articleย I, Sectionย 2 of the Constitution, commenced on this day in 1790. The total count was 3,929,214.ย ๐บ๐ธ The first Lincoln Cents were released into circulation on this day in 1909, the centennial year of Abraham Lincoln’s birth.ย ๐ฐ And our Wednesday tour of World Heritage Sites this week will take you to the storied city of Samarkand in Uzbekistan.ย ๐บ๐ฟ
Thursday (3 August 2023) โ The famous opera house “La Scala” opened on this day in 1778 in Milan, Italy.ย ๐ต Today is also the birthday of the Pulitzer Prizeโwinning World War II journalist Ernie Pyle (1900โ1945).ย ๐ฐ
Friday (4 August 2023) โ The great English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on this day in 1792.ย ๐ It’s also the birthday of the great American trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong (1901โ1971).ย ๐บ Our Friday Bird Families post this week, the last one for the 2022โ2023 homeschool year, will introduce you to an assortment of accidental and extinct North American birds that are featured at the end of your recommended bird guide. Visit our River Houses calendar page and print out a new Calendar of American Birds to follow for the new homeschool year coming up next month.ย ๐ฆ
Saturday (5 August 2023) โ Today is an important day in the history of American press freedom. On this day in 1735, a jury found John Peter Zenger and his newspaper, the New York Weekly Journal, not guilty of seditious libel against the governor of New York on the grounds that what they had published was true.ย ๐ฐ Today is also the birthday of American astronaut Neil Armstrong (1930โ2012), the first man to walk on the moon.ย ๐ย ๐ย ๐จโ๐ And speaking of things celestial, since this is the first Saturday of the month, today we’ll post our regular monthly preview of some of the astronomical events you and your students can watch for over the next few weeks.ย ๐ญ
Sunday (6 August 2023) โ Today is the birthday of the great Victorian poet Alfred Tennyson (1809โ1892).ย ๐ It’s also the birthday of the legendary American comedian Lucille Ball (1911โ1989).ย ๐บ And our Sunday Statesย & Countries for next week will be Alaskaย ๐บ๐ธ, Vietnamย ๐ป๐ณ, Yemenย ๐พ๐ช, Zambiaย ๐ฟ๐ฒ, and Zimbabweย ๐ฟ๐ผ.
๐ป โ๏ธ OUR TOAST THIS WEEK and our weekly poem for the first week of August are one and the same, for Herman Melville’s birthday: the ringing toast-poem โTo the Master of the Meteor.โ The Meteor was a sailing ship, and the master (captain) of the Meteor was Hermanโs brother Thomas Melville, somewhere at sea. Why not treat your students to this wonderful toast around your family table this week:
Lonesome on earth’s loneliest deep,
Sailor! who dost thy vigil keepย โ
Off the Cape of Storms dost musing sweep
Over monstrous waves that curl and comb;
Of thee we think when here from brink
We blow the mead in bubbling foam.
Of thee we think, in a ring we link;
To the shearer of ocean’s fleece we drink,
And the Meteor rolling home.
โกโ Toasts can be a wonderful educational tradition for your family table. We offer one each week โ 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?ย ๐ฅ
๐ ๐บ๐ฟ EVERYTHING FLOWS: Uzbekistan in central Asia is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Chirchiq River, a tributary of Uzbekistan’s Syr Darya River. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Chirchiq River entry in Wikipedia or perhaps on your next visit to your local library.
โกโ 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 your world almanac (pages 695โ697), 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. Aย whole world of geographical learning awaits you.ย ๐โ๐โ๐
What do you have planned for your homeschool this week?ย ๐
โกโ 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. You can also print your own River Houses calendars of educational events and follow along with us.ย ๐
โกโ 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!ย ๐
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โกโ Join us! The aim of the River Houses project is to create a network of friendly local homeschool support groupsย โ local chapters that we call โHouses.โ 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.ย ๐ก