🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 4 August 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!)

🌠 THE PERSEID METEOR SHOWER is expected to reach its annual peak on the nights of August 11th through the 13th. This should be a relatively good year for viewing later in the night after the moon sets. Be sure to go outside and take a look! (And give your eyes time to get adjusted to the dark.) 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 new — that’s the best time of the month for dark-sky 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.

🗓 TODAY, Sunday (4 August 2024) — Today is the 217th day of 2024; there are 149 days remaining in this leap year. Learn more about different modern and historical calendars in the Science & Technology section of your recommended world almanac 📚 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). 🎺

Monday (5 August 2024) — 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. 🚀 🌕 👨‍🚀

Tuesday (6 August 2024) — Today is the birthday of the great Victorian poet Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892). 🖋 Today is also the birthday of the legendary American comedian Lucille Ball (1911–1989). 📺 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. 🔭

Wednesday (7 August 2024) — 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). 💀 And our Wednesday tour of World Heritage Sites this week will take you to the Historic Town of Zabid in Yemen. 🇾🇪

Thursday (8 August 2024) — 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 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. 🌠

Friday (9 August 2024) — 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. 🔔 And 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. ⚗️ Our year-long series of Friday Bird Families posts that reviewed all the birds of North America is now complete! Take a look at all the wonderful avian friends we made this past year, and visit our main River Houses calendar page to print a new Calendar of American Birds for the new homeschool year that will begin in September. 🦅

Saturday (10 August 2024) — 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 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 (11 August 2024) — According to the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar, used by the Maya and several other pre-Columbian civilizations, the world was created on this day in the year 3114 B.C. (as reckoned by our own modern Gregorian Calendar). 🗓 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: Vietnam in southeastern Asia is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Red River, which flows past the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Red 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. 🏡