“Let our rejoicing rise / High as the listening skies, / Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from James Weldon Johnson, for Martin Luther King’s birthday.)
🗓 Homeschool Holidays & Anniversaries (Recent Posts)
A collection of great homeschool teaching ideas, resources, and little lessons on history, holidays, anniversaries, and notable events from the River Houses Homeschool Network. Print your own homeschool calendar for the whole year on our main River Houses calendar page and follow along with us, and add your name to our free River Houses mailing list to get posts like these delivered right to your mailbox every week! 😊
🎵 🎭 HAPPY TWELFTH NIGHT!
“Long long ago the world begun, / With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain. / But that’s all one, our play is done, / And we’ll strive to please you every day.” (Shakespeare helps us bring the 2020–2021 Christmas Season, and our Homeschool Holiday Music Month, to a close.)
🗡♗ HOMESCHOOL HISTORY: Murder in the Cathedral
Take five minutes today to teach your students the story of Archbishop Thomas Becket, whose murder on this day in the year 1170 has loomed large in the Western imagination for nearly a thousand years.
🌊 WONDERFUL WORDS: “It was a short, cold Christmas”
Herman Melville reminds us that even on Christmas Day, somewhere in the world there are sailors heading out to sea.
🎄 🦦 HAVE YOURSELF AN OTTERIFIC CHRISTMAS
Our mascot Horace the River Otter wishes you and yours, and homeschoolers everywhere, a merry, peaceful, and positively otterific Christmas.
📡 🎅 🦌 NORAD’s Santa Tracker is Up!
Want to know when your Christmas presents will arrive? Don’t ask Amazon, ask NORAD! (And maybe even learn a little world geography along the way.)
🎵 🎄 A CHRISTMAS EVE INVITATION: Carols from King’s College
The beautiful Festival of Lessons and Carols from King’s College at Cambridge University is broadcast every year on Christmas Eve to millions of people around the world. You and your homescholars can join them.
🎵 🍽 THANKSGIVING MEMORIES: “We Gather Together”
Take a just moment this week to introduce your homeschool students to a beautiful four-hundred-year-old Dutch folk tune that has become a Thanksgiving classic.
🎵 🏡 THANKSGIVING MUSIC: “Rise up, follow me, I will lead you home”
“Through the air there’s a calling from far away, / There’s a voice I can hear that will lead me home.” (Some lovely music and words from Stephen Paulus and Michael Dennis Browne, for homeschool Thanksgiving.)
🖋 🦃 WONDERFUL WORDS: Delicious “Thanksgiving Magic”
“Oh, some like magic made by wands, / And some read magic out of books, / And some like fairy spells and charms / But I like magic made by cooks!” (Our homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Rowena Bastin Bennett, for Thanksgiving!)
🇺🇸 SEVEN SCORE and Seventeen Years Ago
“What place is this? Where are we now?” (Marking the 157th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, with help from Ken Burns and Carl Sandburg.)
📚 🇺🇸 STUDENT OPPORTUNITIES: The Veterans History Project
You and your homeschool students can contribute to an important historical documentary project by interviewing American military veterans in your family or community for the Library of Congress.
