🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 16 November 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 ANNUAL LEONID METEOR SHOWER is expected to peak on Monday–Tuesday night (17–18 November) and may spread over into the nights before and after as well. This should be a good viewing year since there will only be a thin crescent moon in the sky on the peak nights. (The moon will be new and the sky darkest on the 20th.) The Leonids are debris from Comet Tempel–Tuttle. For more on meteor showers, turn to pages 130–133 in your backyard astronomy guide.

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is New York, and our COUNTRIES are Costa Rica 🇨🇷, Cote d’Ivoire 🇨🇮, Croatia 🇭🇷, and Cuba 🇨🇺. (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 a waning 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 (16 November 2025) — Today is the 320th day of 2025; there are 45 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 movie Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the first in the series, was released on this day in 2001. It earned just shy of $1 billion worldwide at the box office. 🧙

Monday (17 November 2025) — Today is the birthday of German mathematician and astronomer August Ferdinand Möbius (1790–1868), the inventor (or discoverer?) of the strip that bears his name. 🥓

Tuesday (18 November 2025) — Saint Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, the largest church in the world, was consecrated on this day in 1626. 🇻🇦 And today is the birthday of the great American musician Johnny Mercer (1909–1976), lyricist of “Moon River” and many other American standards. 🎼

Wednesday (19 November 2025) — Eight score and two years ago today, Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. American school children often memorized it once upon a time. Why not read it aloud in your homeschool today — you’ll find the text in your homeschool almanac. 🇺🇸 And our Wednesday tour of American Heritage Sites this week will take you to Fort Ticonderoga in New York. 🇺🇸

Thursday (20 November 2025) — On this day in 1820, an 80-ton sperm whale struck and sank the whaleship Essex about 2000 miles off the west coast of South America. The destruction of the Essex would become one of the inspirations for Herman Melville’s great novel Moby-Dick (1851), and it would be later dramatized in the 2015 film In the Heart of the Sea. 🐳 Today is also the birthday of the American astronomer and cosmologist Edwin Hubble (1889–1953), who vastly enlarged our understanding of the universe. 🔭

Friday (21 November 2025) — On this day in 1905, a technical paper titled “Does the inertia of a body depend upon its energy content?” was published in the German science journal Annalen der Physik (Annals of Physics). The author was a 26-year-old patent clerk named Albert Einstein and the paper established that E = mc². ⚛️️ Our Friday Bird Families lesson this week will introduce you to the cursorial Sandpipers (Part I). Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦅

Saturday (22 November 2025) — Today is the birthday of the great Victorian writer Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880), better known under the pen name George Eliot. 🖋 And our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the last week of November is Rowena Bastin Bennett’s “Thanksgiving Magic,” for all Thanksgiving Day cooks from sea to shining sea. Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us throughout the year. 🍽

Sunday (23 November 2025) — One of the great early masters of polyphonic music, Thomas Tallis, died on this day in 1583. (He was born about 1505 on a date unknown.) Tallis wrote, and his themes inspired, some of the most ethereal music in the world. 🎼 And our Sunday States & Countries for next week will be North Carolina 🇺🇸, Cyprus 🇨🇾, Czechia (Czech Republic) 🇨🇿, Denmark 🇩🇰, and Djibouti 🇩🇯.

🥂 🇺🇸 OUR WEEKLY TOAST is for the 162nd anniversary of the Gettysburg Address: “A new birth of freedom.”

❡ 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: Costa Rica in Central America is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is Costa Rica’s beautiful Reventazón River, which flows into the Caribbean Sea. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Reventazón 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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