🗓 QUICK FRESHES for Homeschool Families – Week of 31 December 2023

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. Add your name to our free mailing list 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 2024 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 post for the week went up just a few minutes ago.)

🌖 THE MOON at the beginning of this week is gibbous and waning — a good time for moon watching! You can explore the night sky 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 on pages 333–348 in your world almanac. Browse through our regular homeschool astronomy posts for even more.

🗓 TODAY, Sunday (31 December 2023) — Today is the 365th day of 2023; it’s the last day of this common year! Learn more about different modern and historical calendars on pages 349–355 in your (brand new 2024!) River Houses almanac. 📚 It’s New Year’s Eve! 🎉 Ring Out, Wild Bells! 🔔 It’s also the birthday of the great French artist Henri Matisse (1869–1954). 🎨

Monday (1 January 2023 2024) — 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. 🇺🇸 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. 🐑️

Tuesday (2 January 2024) — Today is Perihelion 2024, the date on which the earth in its annual (and slightly elliptical) orbit is closest to the sun. ☀️ 🌎 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). 🤖 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 Social 300s. 📚

Wednesday (3 January 2024) — 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 Wednesday tour of World Heritage Sites this week will take you to Tikal National Park in Guatemala. 🇬🇹

Thursday (4 January 2024) — 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. 🐦

Friday (5 January 2024) — 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 Friday Bird Families post this week will introduce you to the Storks, Frigatebirds, Boobies, Gannets, Cormorants, Darters, and Pelicans. Print your own River Houses Calendar of American Birds and follow the flyways with us throughout the year. 🦅

Saturday (6 January 2024) — Today is the birthday of the American poet Carl Sandburg (1878–1967). 🖋 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 (7 January 2024) — On this day in 1610, Galileo Galilei first reported that he had discovered several previously unknown moons orbiting the planet Jupiter — we now call them the Galilean moons: Ganymede, Callisto, Io, and Europa. You can see them from your own backyard with almost any small telescope. 🔭 Today is also the birthday of the African-American writer and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960). 🖋 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: Guatemala in Central America is one of our countries-of-the-week, so our Weekly World River is the Suchiate River, which forms part of the border between Guatemala and Mexico. You can find its location in your recommended homeschool atlas, and you can read more about it in the Suchiate 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, or start with the river lists in your brand new 2024 world almanac (pages 696–698), 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 have planned for your homeschool this week, this month, and this wonderful new year? 😊

❡ 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. 🏡