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 ๐ช This is the last full week of HERCULES TERM, our summer term in the River Houses. Cygnus Term, our fall term, and the new 2023โ2024 River Houses year, begin on Friday the first of September.
๐บ๐ธโ OUR SPECIAL โSTATESโ OF THE WEEK, as the homeschool year approaches its close, are the U.S. Territories of American Samoa ๐ฆ๐ธ, Guam ๐ฌ๐บ, the Northern Mariana Islands ๐ฒ๐ต, Puerto Rico ๐ต๐ท, the U.S. Virgin Islands ๐ป๐ฎ, and the District of Columbia, and our โCOUNTRIESโ are the five oceans of the world.ย ๐ (Our separate Sunday States & Countries post for the week went up just a few minutes ago.)
๐ THE MOON at the beginning of this week is a waxing crescentย โ aย good time for stargazing! 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 (20 August 2023) โ Today is the 232nd day of 2023; there are 133 days remaining in this common year. Learn more about different modern and historical calendars on pages 357โ363 in your recommended world almanac.ย ๐ Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s famous 1812 Overture debuted on this day in 1882 in Moscow.ย ๐ General William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, died on this day in 1912, and, we may hope, entered into heaven ๐บ And on this day in 1975, NASA launched the Viking 1 Mars probe. Viking 1 became the first successful Mars lander and remained in operation for more than six years. (An earlier probe, the Soviet Union’s Marsย 3, did successfully land on Mars in 1971, but it transmitted for only twenty seconds.)ย ๐
Monday (21 August 2023) โ Nat Turner’s Rebellion, one of the largest slave uprisings in early America, began on this night in 1831 in Southampton County, Virginia.ย โ๏ธ And on this day in 1959, Hawaii became the 50th state of the Union. ๐บ๐ธ
Tuesday (22 August 2023) โ The English Civil War between the King and Parliament began on this day in 1642 when Charlesย I raised the royal standard at Nottingham. To make this anniversary into a nice little homeschool lesson, turn to page 264 in your River Houses history encyclopedia.ย ๐ย โ๏ธ Today is also the birthday of famed French pianist and composer Claude Debussy (1862โ1918).ย ๐น And our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the fourth week of August, the last full week of the 2022โ2023 River Houses year, is “Envoy,” a cheerful farewell wish for happy houses and living waters from Robert Louis Stevenson. Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us all through the new homeschool year to come.ย ๐ก
Wednesday (23 August 2023) โ On this day in 1775, four months after Lexington and Concord and two months after Bunker Hill, King George III formally proclaimed the American colonies to be in a state of “open and avowed rebellion.”ย โ๏ธ And our Wednesday World Heritage tours that began all the way back last September are now complete! Take a look at all the world’s wonders we explored and stop by our homeschool calendar page to print a copy of the new schedule we’ll be following in the 2023โ2024 homeschool year ahead!ย ๐
Thursday (24 August 2023) โ On this day in 1814, during the War of 1812, British troops captured the city of Washington and burned the White House and the U.S. Capitol.ย ๐ฌ๐งโโ๏ธโ๐บ๐ธ
Friday (25 August 2023) โ On the second day of the burning of Washington in 1814, the U.S. Treasury, the Library of Congress, and other public buildings were destroyed by British Troops.ย ๐ฌ๐งโโ๏ธโ๐บ๐ธ Today is also the birthday of American illustrator Walt Kelly (1913โ1973), the creator of the comic strip Pogo.ย ๐จ And it’s also the birthday of the great American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein (1918โ1990).ย ๐ต 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 (26 August 2023) โ Today is the birthday of one of the founders of modern chemistry, the great French scientist Antoine Lavoisier (1743โ1794), who coined the names “oxygen” and “hydrogen.”ย โ๏ธ
Sunday (27 August 2023) โ One of the largest volcanic eruptions in recorded history took place on this day in 1883 in the Krakatoa archipelago of Indonesia. Over the course of the previous day an ash cloud seventeen miles high had developed over the islands, and on the 27th four massive explosions occurred, the largest of which was heard 3000 miles away in the Indian Ocean. The ash injected into the atmosphere by the Krakatoa eruption produced vivid sunsets all around the world for many months.ย ๐ And as an end-of-year bonus, we’ll have one last Sunday Statesย & Countries post today, for the planet Earth itself and the whole amazing universe.ย ๐
๐ฅ ๐ฌ OUR TOAST for the last full week of every homeschool year, as the river meets the ocean, is a traditional maritime offering for all our friends embarking on new voyages: “Fair winds and following seas.”
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
๐ย EVERYTHING FLOWS: Last week we completed our annual tour of the countries of the world (from which we had been selecting our Weekly World Rivers), so it is only fitting this week that we look to the source of them all. The ancient Greeks believed that the whole world was encircled by a great flowing river, and they personified this universal river as the god แฝจฮบฮตฮฑฮฝฯฯ (Okeanos, Oceanus, Ocean). Okeanos was one of the Titans, a child of ฮแฝฯฮฑฮฝฯฯ (Ouranos, Uranus, Heaven) and ฮฮฑแฟฮฑ (Gaia, Terra, Earth), and with his sister-wife ฮคฮทฮธฯฯ (Tethys), Okeanos fathered all the rivers of the world. You can read much more about this father of the waters in the comprehensive Okeanos/Oceanus entry in Wikipedia, or perhaps on your next visit to your local library. Our Weekly World River for this last full week of the River Houses year is therefore the World River, Okeanos.
โกโ Children of Ocean: (Now you know why we have used that heading for this little footnote all year!) 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 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.ย ๐ซ
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