🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 1 December 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.

🗓 🗡 This is the first week of ORION TERM, our winter term in the River Houses. Orion Term runs from December through February.

🎵 🎄 🎅 DECEMBER is Holiday Music Month in the River Houses and throughout the month we’ll be sharing an assortment of seasonal favorites — classical and modern, sacred and secular, serious and silly — along with a collection of easy educational notes to help you teach little musical lessons all along the way. Check our home page regularly to see them as they appear!

📖 A NEW CALENDAR YEAR will be arriving soon, so this is a perfect time to order your new 2025 World Almanac for the year ahead.

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Vermont, and our COUNTRIES are El Salvador 🇸🇻, Equatorial Guinea 🇬🇶, Eritrea 🇪🇷, and Estonia 🇪🇪. (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.

🦦 HORACE THE OTTER says your LATIN word for the week is the noun equus, which means horse. Write it on your homeschool blackboard and send your students to your family dictionary to see how many related English words they can find. (Equestrian, equerry, equid, equine, and more!)

🗓 🗡 Orion Term 2024–2025 Begins

🗓 TODAY, Sunday (1 December 2024) — Today is the 336th day of 2024; there are 30 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 the first day of ORION TERM, our winter term in the River Houses, named for the Great Hunter of the Heavens. 🗡 And this is also the first day of our Holiday Music Month! Keep your eyes and ears open for many musical delights all through December. 🎵 🎄 🎅 Our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the first week of December is “R.L.S.,” a gem-like homage to Robert Louis Stevenson written by A.E. Housman (1859–1936), for all homeschool hunters, literary and celestial. Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us throughout the year. 🗡

Monday (2 December 2024) — The Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, the oldest Jewish synagogue building in the United States, was dedicated on this day in 1763. 🕍

Tuesday (3 December 2024) — Today is the birthday of Gilbert Stuart (1755–1828), the famous portrait-painter of early America. (That’s his version of George Washington on the dollar bill in your pocket.) 🎨 It’s also the birthday of Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), author of The Heart of Darkness and other staples of English literature courses worldwide. 🖋 And since this is the first Tuesday of the month, today we’ll invite you to browse a new Dewey Decimal class with your students on your next visit to your local library. This month: the Religious 200s. 📚

Wednesday (4 December 2024) — Today is the birthday of Scottish historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), one of the most prominent writers of the Victorian era. 🖋 And our Wednesday tour of American Heritage Sites this week will take you to Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park in Vermont. 🇺🇸

Thursday (5 December 2024) — On this day in 1775, in one of the great engineering feats of the American Revolution, Henry Knox began transporting sixty tons of artillery captured from the British at Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain all the way to Boston, a wagon journey of 300 miles through snow-filled forests and over frozen swamps and rivers. ⚔️ Today is also the birthday of the American journalist and political theorist Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968). 🇺🇸 And it’s also the birthday of the great German physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976), the father of quantum mechanics. ⚛️

Friday (6 December 2024) — Today is the birthday of the great American songwriter Ira Gershwin (1896–1983). 🎼 Everglades National Park in Florida was dedicated by President Harry Truman on this day in 1947. 🐊 And our Friday Bird Families lesson this week will introduce you to the Skuas, Jaegers, Auks, Murres, and Puffins. Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦅

Saturday (7 December 2024) — On this day in 1787, Delaware became the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution. 📜 On this day in 1941, “a date which will live in infamy,” the Imperial Japanese Navy launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, bringing the United States into World War II. ⚔️ And since this is the first Saturday of the month, we’ll post our regular monthly preview today of some of the astronomical events you and your students can watch for over the next few weeks. 🔭

Sunday (8 December 2024) — On this day in 1660, a female actor (her identity is disputed) appeared on the English stage for the first time, playing the role of Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello. 🎭 Our homeschool poem-of-the-week for second week of December is Emily Dickinson’s “He ate and drank the precious words,” in honor of her upcoming birthday (on the 10th). Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us throughout the year. 📖 And our Sunday States & Countries for next week will be Kentucky 🇺🇸, Eswatini 🇸🇿, Ethiopia 🇪🇹, Fiji 🇫🇯, and Finland 🇫🇮.

🥂 🗡 OUR TOAST THIS WEEK is our traditional offering for the beginning of Orion Term and for the Great Hunter of the Heavens. The host says: “Not the laurel, but the race.” And the guests respond: “Not the quarry, but the chase.”

❡ 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: Equatorial Guinea on the west coast of Africa is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Muni River, which forms part of the border between Equatorial Guinea to the north and Gabon to the south. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Muni 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. 🏡