🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 29 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.

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

🎵 🎄 OUR HOLIDAY MUSIC MONTH is approaching its close. For the past four weeks we have been 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. Our grand finale will be on the Twelfth Day of Christmas (January 5th), and I bet you can guess what it will be. 🍐🌳

🇺🇸 OUR STATE-OF-THE-WEEK is Louisiana, and our COUNTRIES are Guatemala 🇬🇹, Guinea 🇬🇳, Guinea-Bissau 🇬🇼, and Guyana 🇬🇾. (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 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.

🦦 HORACE THE OTTER says your LATIN word for the week is the noun fortuna, which means (good) fortune. Write it on your homeschool blackboard and send your students to your family dictionary to see how many related English words they can find. (Fortunate, fortuitous, fortune, and more, and often personified as Fortune or Fortuna in both English and Latin.)

🗓 TODAY, Sunday (29 December 2024) — Today is the 364th day of 2024; there are only two 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 the year 1170, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral by followers of King Henry II. For an illustrated review of the history of church and state in the Middle Ages, turn to pages 194–197 in your homeschool history encyclopedia. 🗡 And on this day in 1890, soldiers of the 7th U.S. Cavalry massacred 300 Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota. 🖤

Monday (30 December 2024) — Today is the birthday of the English composer and organist William Croft (1678–1727), whose short choral works for funeral services are among the most beautiful pieces of music ever written. 🎵 Today is also the birthday of Indian–English author and Nobel laureate Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). 🖋

Tuesday (31 December 2024) — It’s New Year’s Eve! 🎉 Ring Out, Wild Bells! 🔔 It’s also the birthday of the great French artist Henri Matisse (1869–1954). 🎨

Wednesday (1 January 2025) — HAPPY NEW YEAR! 🎆 The Julian Calendar went into effect on this day in the year 45 B.C. It was the principal calendar system used in the Western world for more than 1500 years until it was largely replaced by the Gregorian Calendar in 1582. 🗓 Today is the birthday of Betsy Ross (1752–1836), who, tradition says, sewed the first American flag. 🇺🇸 Our Wednesday tour of American Heritage Sites this week will take you to Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve in Louisiana. 🇺🇸 And our homeschool poem-of-the-week for first week of January is Philip Larkin’s winter poem of promise, “First Sight.” Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us throughout the year. 🐑️

Thursday (2 January 2025) — On this day in 1860, French mathematician and astronomer Urbain Le Verrier announced the discovery of Vulcan, a planet circling the sun inside the orbit of Mercury. No subsequent research has been able to confirm the existence of this planet. 🖖 Perhaps coincidentally, or perhaps not, today is also the birthday of the great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov (1920–1992). 🤖

Friday (3 January 2025) — Today is the birthday of the great Roman orator and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.). 🏛 It’s also the birthday of English writer J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973), author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. 🌋 And our Friday Bird Families lesson this week will introduce you to the oceanic Shearwaters, Petrels, and Storm-Petrels. Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year.

Saturday (4 January 2025) — Today is the birthday of French educator Louis Braille (1809–1852), the inventor of the famous tactile writing system for the blind. ⠗⠓ It’s also the birthday of the original James Bond. 🐦 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. 🔭 And speaking of things astronomical, today is Perihelion 2025, the date on which the earth in its annual (and slightly elliptical) orbit is closest to the sun. ☀️ 🌎

Sunday (5 January 2025) — Today is the Twelfth Day of Christmas and tonight is Twelfth Night, and that means it’s the end of our Holiday Music Month — and you know what song we’ll be going out with. 🍐🌳 And our Sunday States & Countries for next week will be Indiana 🇺🇸, Haiti 🇭🇹, Honduras 🇭🇳, Hungary 🇭🇺, and Iceland 🇮🇸.

🥂 🗓 OUR WEEKLY TOAST, for the New Year, was first published in Poor Richard’s Almanac in December of 1755: “May you always be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and may every New Year find you a better man.”

❡ 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: Guinea-Bissau in western Africa is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Cacheu River, one of the longest rivers of Guinea-Bissau. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Cacheu 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. 🏡