🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 8 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 each week. Visit our River Houses calendar page to print your own homeschool calendars and planners for the entire year.

🌠 The annual GEMINID meteor shower is expected to peak this coming Friday–Sunday nights (13–15 December). Unfortunately the moon will be almost full this year so the show will probably not be the best, but if you have good weather it will still be worth going out with your students for a look. (Seeing how the bright moon washes out the dimmer stars and meteors is a lesson itself.) The Geminids are debris from an unusual object called 3200 Phaethon.

🎵 🎄 🎅 DECEMBER is Holiday Music Month in the River Houses and throughout the month (all the way until Twelfth Night, actually) we’re 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!

🎵 🎄 📻 And speaking of HOLIDAY MUSIC, I have WQXR’s Holiday Channel on in the background almost every day this month. Won’t you join me?

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Kentucky, and our COUNTRIES are Eswatini 🇸🇿, Ethiopia 🇪🇹, Fiji 🇫🇯, and Finland 🇫🇮. (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 at its first quarter — a good time for moon watching! 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 verb erro, which means wander or go astray. Write it on your homeschool blackboard and send your students to your family dictionary to see how many related English words they can find. (Err, errant, erroneous, error, and more!)

🗓 TODAY, Sunday (8 December 2024) — Today is the 343rd day of 2024; there are 23 days remaining in this leap year. Learn more about different modern and historical calendars in the Science & Technology section of your recommended world almanac. 📚 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. 🎭 And 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. 📖

Monday (9 December 2024) — Today is the birthday of the great English poet and republican revolutionary John Milton (1608–1674), one of the towering figures in the history of the English language. 🍎 And on this day in 1965, the much-loved special “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” with now-classic music by Vince Guaraldi (1928–1976), premiered on CBS television. 🎄

Tuesday (10 December 2024) — Today is the birthday Augusta Ada (Byron) King, Countess of Lovelace (1815–1852), a pioneer of computer science (long before the field existed). 🖥 It’s also the birthday of the great American poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886). 🎂

Wednesday (11 December 2024) — Today is the birthday of British scientist David Brewster (1781–1868), the inventor of the kaleidoscope! 🌈 Today is also the birthday of two very different Nobel laureates: the German microbiologist Robert Koch (1843–1910), who identified the bacterial basis for many human diseases, and the Russian writer and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), who exposed the evils of Soviet Communism to the world. 🔬 🖋 And our Wednesday tour of American Heritage Sites this week will take you to the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park in Kentucky. 🇺🇸

Thursday (12 December 2024) — On this day in 1901 at St. John’s, Newfoundland, engineer and inventor Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937) successfully received the first trans-Atlantic radio transmission (sent from Cornwall in the U.K.). 📻

Friday (13 December 2024) — It’s Friday the 13th! 🙀 Fifty-two years ago today, on 13 December 1972, Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt begin their third and final extra-vehicular activity or “moonwalk.” To date, they are the last humans to have set foot on the moon. 🚀 🌕 Our Friday Bird Families lesson this week will introduce you to the water-loving Gulls, Terns, and Skimmers (Part I). Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦅

Saturday (14 December 2024) — Today is the first of the Halcyon Days, the seven days on either side of the winter solstice during which, saith ancient tradition, the stormy seas are calm. 🏝 Today is also the birthday of the great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601). 🔭 On this day in 1911, Roald Amundson, Olav Bjaaland, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel, and Oscar Wisting became the first men ever to reach the South Pole. For an illustrated review of the final phases of the exploration of our planet’s surface, turn to pages 320–321 in your homeschool history encyclopedia. 🎿 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: Aldebaran, the brightest star in the constellation Taurus the Bull. 🌟

Sunday (15 December 2024) — The famous film Gone With the Wind, starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, premiered in Atlanta, Georgia, on this day in 1939. 🎬 On this day in 1970, the Soviet spacecraft Venera 7 made the first-ever soft landing on another planet (Venus). 🚀 Our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the third week of December, as the winter solstice approaches, is Robert Frost’s “Reluctance,” for autumn’s end. 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 Tennessee 🇺🇸, France 🇫🇷, Gabon 🇬🇦, The Gambia 🇬🇲, and Georgia 🇬🇪.

🥂 🎵 OUR WEEKLY TOAST for Homeschool Holiday Music Month is an old traditional that has been offered at least since the 1790s: “May the charms of music harmonize our hearts.”

❡ 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: The Pacific island-nation of Fiji is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Navua River on the Fijian island of Viti Levu. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Navua 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. 🏡