🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 8 September 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.

🌞 🌏 🌕 There will be a PARTIAL LUNAR ECLIPSE next week on the night of 17–18 September 2024 (Tuesday–Wednesday). The earth’s deep shadow (the umbra) will only clip the edge of the full moon, so it won’t be a major event, but it will definitely be worth going outside to see with your students. The best time will be about 10:45 p.m. Eastern U.S. time on the evening of the 17th. Get all the details right here and mark your calendar!

📚 Have you found all the LIBRARIES in your local area? There may be more than you realize, and the WorldCat Library Finder will help you discover them. Pick a convenient day and time and begin a regular pattern of visiting your favorite library on that day every week. It’s one of the best ways to create a light structure for your educational year.

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Pennsylvania, and our COUNTRIES are Angola 🇦🇴, Antigua & Barbuda 🇦🇬, Argentina 🇦🇷, and Armenia 🇦🇲. (Our separate Sunday States & Countries lesson for the week went up just a few minutes ago.)

🌒 THE MOON at the beginning of this week is a waxing crescent — a good time for 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 (8 September 2024) — Today is the 252nd day of 2024; there are 114 days remaining in this leap year. Learn more about different modern and historical calendars in the Science & Technology section of your recommended world almanac. 📚 Today is one of the most important anniversary dates in American — nay, in world cultural history: on this day in 1966, the first episode of Star Trek, “The Man Trap,” was broadcast on NBC television. 🚀 🖖 And our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the second week of September is Elizabeth Jennings’ lovely “Song at the Beginning of Autumn,” for the start of Cygnus Term. Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us throughout the 2024–2025 homeschool year. 🍁

Monday (9 September 2024) — Today is the birthday of the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910). 📚 It’s also the birthday of the American businessman Harland David Sanders (1890–1980), better known as Colonel Sanders, the founder of the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant chain. 🍗

Tuesday (10 September 2024) — Today is the birthday of the great English composer Henry Purcell (1659–1695). 🎵 It’s also the birthday of the American physicist Arthur Compton (1892–1962), winner of the 1927 Nobel Prize for his studies of electromagnetism. ⚡

Wednesday (11 September 2024) — Today is the anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3000 people in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. 🇺🇸 It’s also the birthday of the Scottish explorer Mungo Park (1771–1806), one of the first Europeans to travel to the interior of Africa. 🌍 And our Wednesday tour of American Heritage Sites this week will take you to Independence National Historical Park in Pennsylvania. 🇺🇸

Thursday (12 September 2024) — This is the traditional date of the Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C., one of the most consequential battles in the history of the Western world, in which the Athenians and their allies defeated the armies of Darius the Great of Persia in his attempt to conquer mainland Greece. ⚔️ And on this day in 1962, President John F. Kennedy declared that the United States would land a man on the moon “before this decade is out.” 🚀 🌕

Friday (13 September 2024) — It’s Friday the 13th! 🙀 Today is the birthday of the German composer and pianist Clara Schumann (1819–1896). 🎵 It’s also the birthday of the British novelist, children’s author, and WWII fighter pilot Roald Dahl (1916–1990). 🖋 Our Friday Bird Families lesson this week will introduce you to the Ducks, Geese, and Swans (Part I). Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦆

Saturday (14 September 2024) — On this day in 1814 during the British bombardment of Baltimore, Francis Scott Key wrote a poem that he called “Defence of Fort M’Henry.” We know it today as “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the national anthem of the United States. 🇺🇸 The Soviet space probe Luna 2, the first man-made object to reach the lunar surface, crash-landed onto the moon on this day in 1959. 🚀 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. For this first month of the new homeschool year: Deneb, the brightest star in the constellation Cygnus the Swan. 🌟

Sunday (15 September 2024) — Today is the birthday of novelist James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), one of the most popular writers of nineteenth-century America. 🖋 It’s also the birthday of writer and illustrator Robert McCloskey (1914–2003), author of Make Way for Ducklings (1941) and other children’s classics. 🦆 Our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the third week of September is Robert Frost’s “The Tuft of Flowers,” for the fall harvest, our common labor, and the Monarch butterfly migration. Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us. 🦋 And our Sunday States & Countries for next week will be New Jersey 🇺🇸, Australia 🇦🇺, Austria 🇦🇹, Azerbaijan 🇦🇿, and the Bahamas 🇧🇸.

🥂 🇺🇸 THIS WEEK’S TOAST is in memory of Francis Scott Key, and 9-11-2001, and the Greek army at Marathon: “To the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

❡ 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: Armenia in western Asia is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Hrazdan River, which flows through Armenia’s capital city of Yerevan. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Hrazdan 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 (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. 🏡