🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 3 August 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 PERSEID METEOR SHOWER is expected to reach its annual peak next Monday through Wednesday night (11–13 August). It’s always worthwhile to spend some time outside taking a look, but this month the just-past-full moon will wash out many of the fainter meteors, so this may not be the best year for viewing. (But that’s a lesson in itself.) The Perseids are debris from comet Swift–Tuttle.

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Alaska, and our COUNTRIES are Vietnam 🇻🇳, Yemen 🇾🇪, Zambia 🇿🇲, and Zimbabwe 🇿🇼. (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 waxing — 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 preposition ultra, which means beyond. Write it on your homeschool blackboard and send your students to your family dictionary to see how many related English words they can find. (Ultra-everything as a common English prefix of exaggeration.)

🗓 TODAY, Sunday (3 August 2025) — Today is the 215th day of 2025; there are 150 days remaining in this common year. Learn more about different modern and historical calendars in the Science & Technology section of your recommended world almanac. 📚 The famous opera house “La Scala” opened on this day in 1778 in Milan, Italy. 🎵 Today is also the birthday of the Pulitzer Prize–winning World War II journalist Ernie Pyle (1900–1945). 📰

Monday (4 August 2025) — The great English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on this day in 1792. 🖋 It’s also the birthday of the great American trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong (1901–1971). 🎺

Tuesday (5 August 2025) — 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. 📰 Today is also the birthday of American astronaut Neil Armstrong (1930–2012), the first man to walk on the moon. 🚀 🌕 👨‍🚀 This is 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. 🔭

Wednesday (6 August 2025) — Today is the birthday of the great Victorian poet Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892). 🖋 It’s also the birthday of the legendary American comedian Lucille Ball (1911–1989). 📺 And our Wednesday tour of American Heritage Sites this week will take you to Bering Land Bridge National Preserve in Alaska. 🇺🇸

Thursday (7 August 2025) — General Nathanael Greene, George Washington’s right-hand man and one of the great military strategists of the Revolution, was born on this day in 1742 in Warwick, Rhode Island. Wherever you live in the United States, from Mississippi to Maine, there’s a good chance there’s something named after General Greene near you. ⚔️ And speaking of George Washington, on this day in 1782 he established the first American military decoration, the Badge of Military Merit, for soldiers wounded during the American Revolution. The award is today called the Purple Heart and it bears Washington’s profile. 🎖 Today is also the birthday of famed paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey (1903–1972). 💀

Friday (8 August 2025) — The wreckage of the Civil War submarine H.L. Hunley, which sank in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, in 1864, was raised on this day in the year 2000. It contained the remains of eight Confederate sailors who went down with the vessel. ⚓️ Our Friday Bird Families post this week, the last one for the 2024–2025 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. 🦅 Our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the second week of August is Robert Frost’s “A Star in a Stoneboat,” for this month’s Perseid meteor shower. Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us throughout the year. 🌠

Saturday (9 August 2025) — On this day in the year 1173, construction began on a new bell tower next to the cathedral in Pisa, Italy. Still standing (more or less), we know it today as the Leaning Tower of Pisa. 🔔 Speaking of Italy, today is also the birthday of the Italian scientist Amedeo Avogadro (1776–1856), beloved (or despised) by chemistry students the world over. ⚗️ And since this is the second Saturday of the month, we’ll introduce you to one of the Great Stars of the northern hemisphere night sky. This month: Vega, the brightest star in the constellation Lyra the Lyre and our last Great Star for this homeschool year. 🌟

Sunday (10 August 2025) — This is an important day in museological history: the famous Louvre Museum in Paris opened on this day in 1793, and on this day in 1846 the Smithsonian Institution in Washington was chartered by Congress and named for its principal benefactor, the English chemist and mineralogist James Smithson, who had died seventeen years before and who had never even visited the United States. 🏛 On this day in 1990, NASA’s Magellan spacecraft entered orbit around the planet Venus. 🛰 And our Sunday States & Countries for next week will be Hawaii 🇺🇸 and Antarctica 🇦🇶 (as the year approaches its close).

🥂 🇺🇸 OUR WEEKLY TOAST is an old traditional, offered in honor of General Nathanael Greene, born on August 7th in 1742: “To heroes of olden times.”

❡ 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: Yemen in the Middle East is one of our countries-of-the-week, and like many desert-filled countries, Yemen does not have any permanent rivers. It does, however, have wadis — seasonal streams that are similar to the washes of the southwestern United States. Our Weekly World River from Yemen, therefore, is the rugged Wadi Dirhur on the Yemeni island of Socotra. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about its setting in the Socotra 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. 🏡