🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 15 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.

❤️ It’s such a busy time of year! But don’t worry — just relax and pick one or two items below to enrich your schedule. With that, your weekly lessons are done!

🎵 🎄 🎅 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 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?

📖 Have you gotten your NEW WORLD ALMANAC for the upcoming 2025 year? It’s one of the handiest educational reference books you can have in your homeschool library.

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Tennessee, and our COUNTRIES are France 🇫🇷, Gabon 🇬🇦, The Gambia 🇬🇲, and Georgia 🇬🇪. (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 full — a good time to be out and about in the well-lit night! 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 fabula, which means tale or story. Write it on your homeschool blackboard and send your students to your family dictionary to see how many related English words they can find. (Fable, fabulist, confabulation, and more!)

🗓 TODAY, Sunday (15 December 2024) — Today is the 350th day of 2024; there are 16 days remaining in this leap year. Learn more about different modern and historical calendars in the Science & Technology section of your recommended world almanac. 📚 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). 🚀 And 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. 🍂

Monday (16 December 2024) — It’s Beethoven’s birthday! (Well, probably.) 🎵 It’s also the birthday of the great English novelist Jane Austen (1775–1817). 🖋 And on this day in 1773, a group of disgruntled Bostonians dumped hundreds of pounds of imported tea into Boston Harbor, and “the Boston Tea Party” has been a part of American history ever since. ☕️

Tuesday (17 December 2024) — Today is the birthday of the American poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892). 🖋 And on this day in 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first successful heavier-than-air flight in their prototype airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina — and the rest is aviation history. ✈️

Wednesday (18 December 2024) — The English physicist and Nobel laureate J.J. Thompson, the discoverer of the electron, was born on this day in 1856. ⚛️ And our Wednesday tour of American Heritage Sites this week will take you to Shiloh National Military Park in Tennessee. 🇺🇸

Thursday (19 December 2024) — “These are the times that try men’s souls.” The first of a series of pamphlets by Thomas Paine called “The American Crisis” was published on this this day in 1776 in Philadelphia. 🇺🇸 And today is also the birthday of the pioneering African-American historian Carter G. Woodson (1875–1950). 🔎

Friday (20 December 2024) — Today is the birthday of the American physicist Robert J. Van de Graaff (1901–1967), known for making people’s hair stand on end. ⚡️ The storied Christmas movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” premiered on this day in 1946 in New York City. 📽 And our Friday Bird Families lesson this week will introduce you to the Gulls, Terns, and Skimmers (Part II). Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦅

Saturday (21 December 2024) — Happy First Day of (Astronomical) Winter! ⛄️ Today is the December Solstice, known as the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere and the summer solstice in the southern hemisphere (where today is the first day of astronomical summer). 🗓 On this day in 1913, the first modern crossword puzzle was published in the New York World newspaper. 📰

Sunday (22 December 2024) — Today is the birthday of the great Italian opera composer Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924). 🎼 Our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the last week of December is in fact a double feature: “A Visit from St. Nicholas” by Clement Clarke Moore (for Christmas Eve), and “Auld Lang Syne” by Robert Burns (for New Year’s Eve). 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 Ohio 🇺🇸, Germany 🇩🇪, Ghana 🇬🇭, Greece 🇬🇷, and Grenada 🇬🇩.

🥂 ⛄️ OUR TOAST THIS WEEK is our traditional offering for the week of the winter solstice: “To cold weather and warm 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: Gabon in western Africa is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Ogooué River, Gabon’s principal river and one of the largest rivers in Africa. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Ogooué 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. 🏡