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.
๐ THE PERSEID METEOR SHOWER is expected to reach its annual peak next weekend (12โ13 August). This should be a relatively good year for viewing with only a thin crescent moon in the sky. 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 SwiftโTuttle.
๐บ๐ธ OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Alaska, and our COUNTRIES are Vietnamย ๐ป๐ณ, Yemenย ๐พ๐ช, Zambiaย ๐ฟ๐ฒ, and Zimbabweย ๐ฟ๐ผ. (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 waningย 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 (6 August 2023) โ Today is the 218th day of 2023; there are 147 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 Victorian poet Alfred Tennyson (1809โ1892).ย ๐ It’s also the birthday of the legendary American comedian Lucille Ball (1911โ1989).ย ๐บ
Monday (7 August 2023) โ 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.ย โ๏ธ 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.ย ๐ Today is also the birthday of famed paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey (1903โ1972).ย ๐
Tuesday (8 August 2023) โ 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.ย โ๏ธ Our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the second week of August is Robert Frost’s “Aย Star in aย Stoneboat,” for this month’s Perseid Meteor Shower. Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us throughout the year.ย ๐
Wednesday (9 August 2023) โ 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.ย ๐ And speaking of Italy, today is also the birthday of the Italian scientist Amedeo Avogadro (1776โ1856), beloved (or despised) by chemistry students the world over.ย โ๏ธ Our Wednesday tour of World Heritage Sites this week will take you to the Socotra Archipelago in Yemen.ย ๐พ๐ช
Thursday (10 August 2023) โ 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.ย ๐ And on this day in 1990, NASA’s Magellan spacecraft entered orbit around the planet Venus.ย ๐ฐ
Friday (11 August 2023) โ 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).ย ๐ 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.ย ๐ฆ
Saturday (12 August 2023) โ The Perseid Meteor Shower is expected to peak tonight! ๐ Today is the birthday of poet and educator Katharine Lee Bates (1859โ1929), the author of the great anthem “America the Beautiful.”ย ๐บ๐ธ It’s also the birthday of Austrian physicist and Nobel laureate Erwin Schrรถdinger (1887โ1961), one of the founders of quantum mechanics.ย ๐ 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.ย ๐
Sunday (13 August 2023) โ Today is the birthday of American abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Lucy Stone (1818โ1893).ย โ๏ธ It’s also the birthday of spooky British-American film director Alfred Hitchcock (1899โ1980).ย ๐ฌ Andย … it’s International Lefthanders Day!ย ๐ Our Sunday Statesย & Countries for next week will be Hawaiiย ๐บ๐ธ and Antarcticaย ๐ฆ๐ถ (as the year approaches its close).
๐ฅ ๐บ๐ธ OUR WEEKLY TOAST is an old traditional, offered in honor of General Nathanael Greene: “To heroes of olden times.”
โกโ Toasts can be a wonderful educational tradition for your homeschool lunch or dinner table. We offer one each weekย 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 (“Toย unpredictability in toasting!”). What will you toast in your homeschool this week?ย ๐ฅ
๐ ๐ฟ๐ผ EVERYTHING FLOWS: Zimbabwe in southern Africa is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Mzingwane River, a tributary of the great Limpopo. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Mzingwane 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
๐ AND DON’T FORGET: Friday the 13th comes on a Sunday this month!
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.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