And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
—Shakespeare
Great homeschool teaching ideas, resources, and little lessons on books and libraries from the River Houses Homeschool Network. Add your name to our River Houses homeschool mailing list and get these posts delivered right to your mailbox every week! 😊
Today is National Fossil Day! Since 2009, the U.S. National Park Service has celebrated National Fossil Day during international Earth Science Week “to highlight the scientific and educational value of paleontology and the importance of preserving fossils for future generations.”
Depending on where you live you may or may not be able to get out and examine fossils easily in the field, but thanks to the Smithsonian Institution and the wonderful online Biodiversity Heritage Library, you and your students can explore a wealth of books and other published materials on paleontology right from the comfort of your little home academy. Many of these materials are quite rare and valuable, and as recently as a few years ago they would have been accessible only to professional researchers in the largest institutions. Here’s an introduction to these online materials from the Smithsonian Libraries:
“In celebration of the opening of the David H. Koch Hall of Fossils opening at the National Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Libraries has curated an online collection of important and beautiful selections from the Libraries’ Paleobiology literature. The digitized books are hosted on the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. As part of this celebration, we have invited renowned scientists and librarians to discuss the collection and identify their favorite books in a series of blog posts highlighting their picks (coming soon!). Check out the more than 400 volumes here!
“Our online volumes are drawn from a much larger collection of monographs and journals curated by Smithsonian Libraries. Smithsonian Libraries’ Vertebrate Paleontology Library holds over 1,800 volumes focusing on physical geography, stratigraphy and systematic paleontology, and paleozoology of chordates and vertebrates of the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, Tertiary, and Quaternary periods. The Joseph F. Cullman 3rd Library of Natural History holds the Smithsonian’s collection of rare books in anthropology and the natural sciences. Its world-class collection contains approximately 20,000 volumes published before 1840 in fields that include physical and cultural anthropology, Native American linguistics, and archeology; botany; ornithology, mammalogy, herpetology, ichthyology, entomology, and other zoological fields; paleontology; and geology and mineralogy. View the collection now on BHL!
“All Smithsonian Libraries make our books available to researchers on site. For the first time, many of these important paleontological works are now gathered digitally in one online collection for anyone with internet access, through our partnership with the Biodiversity Heritage Library.“ (Smithsonian Libraries)
What natural discoveries have you made in your homeschool lately — inside the library or out in the field? 😊
Tuesday is our Homeschool Books & Libraries Day in the River Houses, and on the first Tuesday of each month we invite you and your homescholars to explore one of the major Dewey Decimal classes at your local library. If you start at the beginning of the River Houses year in September and run until July, you can “adopt” one major class each month and cover the whole of knowledge (!) in a year.
The class for October is the 000s — the “zero-hundreds” — which covers General Works. The Dewey system is grouped by hundreds, so “the 000s” means the numbers running from 000 to 099. Interestingly, because the Dewey system was developed long before computers were invented, the major subject of computer science originally had no Dewey home, so it was eventually put into the 000s also, although an argument could be made that it should have been put into either the 500s (Science) or the 600s (Technology) instead.
Here’s what you’ll find at your local library in the zero-hundreds:
000 – Computer science, knowledge, & systems (General)
010 – Bibliography
020 – Library & information sciences
030 – Encyclopedias & books of facts
040 – Unassigned (formerly Biographies)
050 – Magazines, journals, & serials
060 – Associations, organizations, & museums
070 – News media, journalism, & publishing
080 – Quotations & general collections (interviews, lectures, etc.)
090 – Manuscripts & rare books
Each of these “tens” divisions is subdivided further of course. For example, in the 090s (Manuscripts & rare books) you’ll find works on Incunabula (093), Books notable for bindings (095), Books notable for illustrations (096), Prohibited works, forgeries, & hoaxes (098), and so on.
When you’re learning the library with your students, be sure they understand that any library collection that uses the Dewey Decimal Classification will be arranged in the same way: the numbers run from 000 to 999 in every Dewey-based library, so if you’re interested in, say, Astronomy, you’ll find it in the 520s in both the small-town library near you and in the big-city library across the country. If you have an opportunity to make field trips to multiple libraries over the course of the year you’ll be able to demonstrate that in practice and get your students accustomed to orienting themselves by reading the numbers aloud as you walk together down the ranges: “500 … 510 … 515 … here it is, 520.”
Learning these library basics will help your students become independent life-long learners and will ensure that they’ll feel right at home in any library they visit.
What delightful decimals have you discovered in your library lately? 😊
❡ Make it a tradition: Why not spend a few minutes during your first library visit each month and devise a little Dewey tradition of your own. Read the title page of one book in the 000s, one in the 010s, one in the 020s, one in the 030s, and so on. Find the very first book in the class (the lowest 000) and the very last book in the class (the highest 099). Find the thinnest book and the thickest book in each class. Make a list of your three favorite numbers in each class. If you follow a simple pattern like this month-by-month, over the course of the year you’ll be surprised how much information your students will absorb and how many skills they will develop without even realizing it. 🔎
❡ Planning ahead: If you’d like to map out a custom year-long Dewey project for your homeschool, here’s the first-Tuesday schedule we follow in the River Houses: Introducing Dewey (September); The General 000s (October); The Philosophical 100s (November); The Religious 200s (December); The Social 300s (January); The Linguistic 400s (February); The Scientific 500s (March); The Technological 600s (April); The Artistic 700s (May); The Literary 800s (June); The Historical 900s (July); and On Beyond Dewey (August). This schedule also appears on our main River Houses calendar for the year — print out your own copy, post it on your family bulletin board, and follow along with us. 🗓
❡ Dukedoms large enough: Have you found all the local libraries in your area? There may be more than you realize, and there’s no better homeschool field trip than a field trip to a new library! The WorldCat Library Finder will help you find all the library collections near you — public and private, large and small — and the WorldCat catalog itself will help you locate the closest copy of almost any book in the world. 😊
Do you have comics-crazy kids in your homeschool? Why not take educational advantage of their interests with some help from a new exhibition at the Library of Congress: Comic Art: 120 Years of Pages and Panels.
Comics are a highly creative art form with a rich history. This exhibition presents that history using the Library’s extensive collection of comic-related materials.
“Welcome to the world of comic art, where a wide variety of visual and narrative storytelling styles have evolved from panels in early newspapers to contemporary comic images. Through unique original drawings and printed pages, this exhibition features the artistic skills of master artists and emerging talents who have created some of the most famous, funny, and frightening characters to appear in print.
“One early comic figure, the Yellow Kid, debuted in a full-size panel in the color pages of the New York World newspaper in 1895 and sparked the rise of comics as a popular new American art form. By the mid-1900s, in addition to the growing number of mainstream comic creators, diverse independent artists were creating comic art that examined their own life stories and commented on culture and politics. These innovators and change makers expanded the art form to include mini comics, graphic novels, fanzines, and web comics.
“The lively visual content, dramatic narrative, and strong character development found in comics have attracted devoted audiences who follow the latest installment in whatever format the story appears. Over time, comic art and its characters have permeated film, television, books, and marketing — making characters familiar to viewers who may or may not read comics themselves.“ (Library of Congress)
You can find more details and a collection of online exhibits for your students to explore at the Library of Congress exhibition website:
From the Yellow Kid, Gasoline Alley, and Krazy Kat, to Dick Tracy, Peanuts, and Pogo, to Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman, there are hundreds of worlds to explore and just as many lessons in history, art, and culture.
What treasures have you discovered at your library lately? 😊
❡ Dukedoms large enough: Have you found all the local libraries in your area? There may be more than you realize, and there’s no better homeschool field trip than a field trip to a new library! The WorldCat Library Finder will help you find all the library collections near you — public and private, large and small — and the WorldCat catalog itself will help you locate the closest copy of almost any book in the world. 😊
Today is Constitution Day! (Or more officially, Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, as enacted by Congress in 2004.) On this day in 1787, the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia approved the U.S. Constitution and sent it to the states for ratification. (And since it’s Tuesday, it’s also our regular Books & Libraries Day in the River Houses.)
The opening of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, 1787. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)
The original Constitution that was signed on this day in 1787 resides now in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., one the world’s great historical libraries. There are some wonderful Constitution Day teaching materials available from the Archives — why not spend a few homeschool minutes with them this week:
And here’s one of a number of introductory videos from the National Archives showing some of the related documents that were important in the Constitution’s development, all safely stored in the Archives’ vaults:
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You can visit the National Archives yourself and see the Constitution (and the Declaration of Independence) on display in the rotunda. Perhaps that will be a homeschool field trip for your family someday. (I visited a number of times, quite a few years ago, when I worked across the street at the Smithsonian Institution.)
You can also find the full text of the Constitution in your River Houses almanac (riverhouses.org/books) on page 465 — why not have your students read the Preamble aloud this week, or if you have more advanced students, pick one of the Articles and discuss what it means and why it was written the way it was. At the very end of the Constitution’s text you can see why today is the anniversary day:
“Done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independence of the United States of America the Twelfth.“
What educational discoveries have you made at your own library lately? 😊
❡ Dukedoms large enough: Have you found all the local libraries in your area? There may be more than you realize, and there’s no better homeschool field trip than a field trip to a new library! The WorldCat Library Finder will help you find all the library collections near you — public and private, large and small — and the WorldCat catalog itself will help you locate the closest copy of almost any book in the world. 😊
❡ Books in the running brooks: The sidebar on the River Houses website (riverhouses.org) has links to several important online library collections that we like to explore, as well as permanent links to WorldCat and the WorldCat Library Finder. Why not sit yourself down at a large screen for a while (rather than a phone) and give them a browse. 😊
Tuesday is our regular Books & Libraries Day in the River Houses, and on the several Tuesdays of September — the first month of the new school year — we (re)introduce some of the general library resources that we recommend to all homeschoolers. Last week we started our annual tour of the Dewey Decimal system, and next week and the week after we’ll invite you and your students to visit the Library of Congress and the National Archives.
This week we ask: have you found all the libraries in your local area? There may be more than you realize!
Many homeschooling families make a tradition out of regular trips to the local library, whether weekly, or monthly, or for some (it may feel like) daily! But are you sure you know all the libraries in your area that could be useful to you and your students?
WorldCat (worldcat.org) is the online global service that provides access to the individual collection catalogs of thousands of local libraries all around the world, public and private, large and small. WorldCat also has a Library Finder feature that will let you type in a location and receive a list of all the libraries in that area. In the United States, I’ve found that the search works best using a zip code — why not give it a try:
For example, if you live in Boise, Idaho, and enter your zip code of 83701, you’ll find that there are more than 100 school, college, and specialty libraries listed in your area, from the Pepper Ridge Elementary School Library, to the Brown Mackie College Library, to the Meridian Idaho East Family History Center Library.
Before WorldCat, the 750 volumes of the National Union Catalog were the only way to discover which libraries had copies of a given book. Not surprisingly, the NUC was generally available only in the largest libraries: it takes up 130 feet of shelf space and weighs three tons. 😮 (Image: Karin Dalziel.)
It may well be that your local town library is the only one near you, especially if you live in a remote area. But you may also discover, for example, that a local hospital has a medical library that could help a homeschool science student, or that a local courthouse has a specialty law library that would be suitable for a social studies project. There may also be small college and technical school libraries in your area that you haven’t yet explored.
Not all these specialized libraries will be open to the public or will have regular hours, of course. But the WorldCat Library Finder will generally give you a street location and contact information for each collection, and if you call and ask whether a local homeschool student could use their facilities for a special project, you might receive a pleasantly positive answer.
Give the WorldCat Library Finder a try and make a list of new libraries to explore in the homeschool year ahead.
What educational discoveries have you made at your library lately? 😊
❡ Books in the running brooks: The sidebar on the River Houses website (riverhouses.org) has links to several important online library collections that we like to explore, as well as permanent links to WorldCat and the WorldCat Library Finder. Why not sit yourself down at a large screen for a while (rather than a phone) and give them a browse. 😊
Tuesday is our Homeschool Books & Libraries Day in the River Houses — we think teaching your students how to use the library independently is one of the best educational gifts you can give them. Most public libraries in the United States arrange their books according to the Dewey Decimal Classification, so teaching the basics of the “DDC” is one of the first things you’ll want to do.
If you start in September at the beginning of the River Houses year and run until July, you can “adopt” one of the major Dewey Decimal classes each month and cover the whole of knowledge (!) in a year. Our first Books & Libraries post each month invites you to do just that, and since this is the very first Books & Libraries post of the entire year, we’ll begin by inviting you to orient your students to the organization of your local library as a whole.
The Dewey Decimal system arranges books into “hundreds” according subject, and the major classes are:
By “hundreds” we mean the numbers running from 00 to 99 within each class: “the 300s” (Social Sciences) means the numbers running from 300 to 399; “the 500s” (Science) means the numbers running from 500 to 599; and so on.
On your next library visit, take a few minutes with your students to find the 000s (“the zero-hundreds”), and then follow the maze of shelves around the library all the way through the 100s, the 200s, the 300s, and so on, to the 999s. You can make it a fun little adventure for your children, and a beginning-of-the-year tradition. Don’t try to memorize the classification or analyze it in detail — just follow the numbers from beginning to end and your little lesson is done.
When you’re learning the library with your students, be sure they understand that any library collection that uses the Dewey Decimal Classification will be arranged in the same way: the numbers run from 000 to 999 in every Dewey-based library, so if you’re interested in, say, astronomy, you’ll find it in the 520s in both the small-town library near you and in the big-city library across the country. If you have an opportunity to make field trips to multiple libraries over the course of the year you’ll be able to demonstrate that in practice and get your students accustomed to orienting themselves by reading the numbers aloud as you walk together down the ranges: “500 … 505 … 510 … here it is, 520.”
Learning these library basics will help your students become independent life-long learners and will ensure that they’ll feel right at home in any library they visit.
What delightful decimals have you discovered in your library lately? 😊
❡ Planning ahead: If you’d like to map out a custom year-long Dewey project for your homeschool, here’s the first-Tuesday schedule we follow in the River Houses: Introducing Dewey (September); The General 000s (October); The Philosophical 100s (November); The Religious 200s (December); The Social 300s (January); The Linguistic 400s (February); The Scientific 500s (March); The Technological 600s (April); The Artistic 700s (May); The Literary 800s (June); The Historical 900s (July); On Beyond Dewey (August). 🗓
❡ Dukedoms large enough: Have you found all the local libraries in your area? There may be more than you realize, and there’s no better homeschool field trip than a field trip to a new library! The WorldCat Library Finder will help you find all the library collections near you — public and private, large and small — and the WorldCat catalog itself will help you locate the closest copy of almost any book in the world. 😊
If you have high-school homeschoolers with a real interest in NASA and space exploration, here’s a great academic project they can contribute to at the National Archives.
“Within the archival film holdings from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration at the National Archives, you will find moving images relating to NASA space flight programs, including Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and the joint United States–Soviet Union program Apollo-Soyuz.
“This incredible series of films includes footage of rigorous training exercises, mock run-throughs, launches, parachute and spacecraft recovery, and other astronaut activities, all detailing the meticulous steps involved in mission preparation and space exploration.
“Help tag descriptive details within these NASA films relating to space flight programs. You can tag names of astronauts, locations, launches, and even machinery and equipment shown within each film. Every tag helps makes these records more searchable.“ (National Archives, Citizen Archivist Program)
Your students would learn a lot about real history — not textbook history — from working on a project like this, and they would gain a host of valuable skills in research and organization. (And their participation would probably look good on a homeschool transcript for college, too!) Learn more about this project and others on the Citizen Archivist missions page:
The Internet provides exceptional opportunities for homeschool students to participate in real research projects like this one in a variety of scientific and scholarly fields, something that would have been impossible only a few years ago. Pay a visit to our Lunar Society page to read about many more projects that your family can join.
What scholarly and scientific discoveries have you made in your homeschool this month? 😊
The Dewey system is the standard in American public libraries, and if your students are familiar with it they’ll be right at home in a small-town library near you and in a big-city library across the country — a lifetime of learning will be open to them.
But the Dewey system isn’t the world’s only library classification system. Most other countries have their own national systems that are suited to their local interests and their local library collections (although some of these are modified versions of the Dewey system).
And there’s also one other big library classification system in use in the United States that your students will almost certainly encounter if they go off to college: the Library of Congress Classification system.
The Library of Congress is Washington is the largest library in the world, and at the beginning of the 20th century, when the Dewey Decimal Classification was coming into common use in most public libraries, Herbert Putnam (1861–1955), the Librarian of Congress, wondered if LC could come up with something more suited to their own vast and ever-growing collections. The result was the Library of Congress Classification, which can accommodate deeper and broader collections more easily, and which is easier to expand than the Dewey system.
While the top level of the Dewey system is based on numbers — the 100s, the 200s, the 300s, and so on — the Library of Congress system is based on letters: Class A, Class B, Class C, Class D, and so on. (And you can see right away that it can have up to 26 top-level categories, instead of the ten that are available in Dewey.)
Most public libraries use the Dewey system, but most college and university libraries use the Library of Congress system. If you have a local university library near you, why not pay it a visit with your students and see how it is arranged. These are the main classes in the LC system:
Class D – World History & History of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, etc.
Class E – History of America
Class F – Local History of the Americas
Class G – Geography, Anthropology, & Recreation
Class H – Social Sciences
Class J – Political Science
Class K – Law
Class L – Education
Class M – Music
Class N – Fine Arts
Class P – Language & Literature
Class Q – Science
Class R – Medicine
Class S – Agriculture
Class T – Technology
Class U – Military Science
Class V – Naval Science
Class Z – Bibliography & Library Science
Just as the top-level Dewey classes are subdivided into “tens” — the 500s (Science) is subdivided into the 510s, the 520s, the 530s, and so on — the Library of Congress system creates first-level subdivisions by adding another letter: Class Q (Science) is subdivided into QA (Mathematics), QB (Astronomy), QC (Physics), QD (Chemistry), and so on.
Take out your copy of our recommended homeschool bird guide, the National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America, and turn to the copyright page at the very end of the volume after the index. There in the fine print you’ll see all the publication details for the book, and as in most titles published today, you’ll also see recommended library call numbers. The recommended Dewey number shown is 598.297 (remember the 500s are Science and the 590s are Zoology), and right above that you’ll see the recommended Library of Congress number: QL681.F53. “Q” is Science, “QL” is Zoology (Animals), and all the numbers from QL670 to QL699 cover Birds.
You may never have occasion to use the Library of Congress system — Dewey is more than adequate for most general libraries — but if you do run across it, don’t panic. It’s just another arrangement, running from AA to ZZ instead of 000 to 999. The skills that your students develop learning Dewey will serve them well if they ever happen to encounter this alternative library “language.”
What delightful decimals have you discovered in your public library lately? Or, what lovely letters have you discovered thanks to the Library of Congress? 😊
❡ Dukedoms large enough: Have you found all the local libraries in your area? There may be more than you realize, and there’s no better homeschool field trip than a field trip to a new library! The WorldCat Library Finder will help you find all the library collections near you — public and private, large and small — and the WorldCat catalog itself will help you locate the closest copy of almost any book in the world. 😊
You can never get started with the Classics too early. 😊
The great American writer Herman Melville was born 200 years ago this Thursday, and in his honor we’re having an informal Homeschooling-With-Herman Week here in the River Houses.
“Call me felted Ishmael.” (Image: Cozy Classics Moby-Dick.)
It goes without saying that all responsible homeschool parents will want to introduce their children to all the Great Works of World Literature at least by age two. In the case of Melville, this can be readily accomplished with the “Cozy Classics” toddler edition of Moby-Dick, featuring needle-felted characters (including a fuzzy white whale):
If you’d like to see whether a local library near you already has it, the WorldCat library catalog will give you an answer (although children’s collections may not always be well indexed):
Note also that this Cozy Classics edition is a regular board/picture-book with photos of the felted characters; the book itself isn’t felt.
The good ship Pequod. (Image: Cozy Classics Moby-Dick.)
If it’s been a while since you’ve done an advanced literary study of Moby-Dick yourself, this volume can help! I hope I won’t run afoul of copyright if I reproduce the full text of the volume in all its rich complexity:
As you can see, this particular edition of Moby-Dick is probably best suited for more advanced toddlers who can appreciate mature concepts such as revenge, madness, isolation, despair, and redemption. Or who like looking at fuzzy pictures. 🐳
What literary discoveries have you made in your homeschool this week? 😊
Tuesday is our regular Books & Libraries Day in the River Houses, and since we’ve been celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing for the last few days, here’s a rare educational opportunity you might be able to work on with your local library: borrowing some actual moon rock samples for students to examine.
This is not a homeschool program specifically — in fact, it’s a rather tightly controlled NASA education program that is open only to paid employees of educational institutions who attend a special training program at a NASA site. But professional librarians do qualify, and if this catches your imagination you might consider working with your local library to make it into a special community education activity.
Students examining rock and soil samples from the moon. (Image: NASA.)
The program and the application process are quite elaborate — they’re outlined on NASA’s educational materials website:
If homeschoolers were to collaborate with their local library they might not only be able to bring this distinctive educational opportunity to their community, but they could also generate favorable publicity for all concerned. (“Moon Rocks Coming to Town,” the local paper will shout.) 😊
Here’s a NASA video that describes the sources of the samples, the sample program, and the procedures involved in requesting and storing the borrowed materials:
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This isn’t a simple weekend project — you’d have to work on it in association with a local library over a period of several months. But it’s an exceptional opportunity to bring genuine samples from an alien world right into your students’ hands. That makes it worth exploring. 🚀
What treasures have you discovered at your library lately? 😊
❡ Dukedoms large enough: Have you found all the local libraries in your area? There may be more than you realize, and there’s no better homeschool field trip than a field trip to a new library! The WorldCat Library Finder will help you find all the library collections near you — public and private, large and small — and the WorldCat catalog itself will help you locate the closest copy of almost any book in the world. 😊
The 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing is this month (Saturday the 20th), and one of the best commemorations that has so far appeared is a full-length documentary called simply Apollo 11. It’s showing in some theaters and can be purchased online — I’ve seen it, and I recommend it highly to all homeschool families.
This documentary is based almost entirely on never-before-seen footage of the Apollo 11 mission that is stored in the U.S. National Archives. For this Homeschool Books & Libraries post, here’s a three-minute background video from the National Archives that shows some of the materials that went into the creation of the full-length film, and how the Archives staff cares for and processes those materials:
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Every homeschool student should know the story of the Apollo 11 mission (and of manned spaceflight in general), and this 50th anniversary documentary is an excellent way to teach about it.
“Crafted from previously unseen 70mm film footage and more than 11,000 hours of uncatalogued audio recordings, [this] new documentary transports moviegoers to the heart of NASA’s most celebrated mission — Apollo 11, the one that first put men on the Moon and forever made Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin into American icons.
“Newly digitized footage discovered at the National Archives and Records Administration plays a major role in the new documentary that allows viewers to experience the perspectives of the astronauts, the Mission Control team, and the millions of spectators on the ground. The film showcases the days and hours in 1969 when American astronauts took “a giant leap for mankind” into the future.“ (National Archives)
Here’s the commercial trailer for the full-length documentary itself:
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Do you have a moon party planned for the 20th? 🌕
What educational discoveries have you made at your library lately? 😊
❡ Dukedoms large enough: Have you found all the local libraries in your area? There may be more than you realize, and there’s no better homeschool field trip than a field trip to a new library! The WorldCat Library Finder will help you find all the library collections near you — public and private, large and small — and the WorldCat catalog itself will help you locate the closest copy of almost any book in the world. 😊
Happy Fourth of July to all our homeschool readers and friends! The Fourth is Independence Day, the Day of the Declaration. What better day is there to take your students on a visit the Declaration itself (online at least) than today! Its home is the National Archives in Washington, as every homeschool student should know:
The original Declaration is on view there for all to see — I’ve seen it, and perhaps you have too. To be sure, the original manuscript is much faded — it was not always stored and displayed under ideal conditions, as it is today. What most people recognize as the Declaration is the engraved version of 1823, made from the original:
The National Archives has a wide range of educational materials about the Declaration, the Founding Documents as a whole, and the entire Revolutionary War Era — why not bookmark then on this Independence Day and explore them throughout the year.
What other historical events and anniversaries will you studying in your homeschool this month? 😊
![[We the People]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Constitution_We_the_People.jpg)
![[WorldCat logo]](https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/q_glossy,ret_img,w_150/https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/worldcat-logo-150x147.png){kind=logo}
![[National Union Catalog]](https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2217/2035550177_08dcd45edb_b.jpg)
If you have high-school homeschoolers with a real interest in NASA and space exploration, here’s a great academic project they can contribute to at the National Archives.
And there’s also one other big library classification system in use in the United States that your students will almost certainly encounter if they go off to college: the Library of Congress Classification system.
Take out your copy of our 
