About Fourth Day Press
The Fourth Day Press warehouse with
the Warehouse Manager
|
Fourth Day Press is a home business of the Ryan Family, a
homeschool family in Cleveland, Ohio. Though we've had an online
store called "Fourth Day Press"
on and off since 2003, we only commenced actual publishing
in 2007.
A lot of astronomy books are
primarily text-based
and
only use
illustration
lightly,
mainly
for ornamental
purposes.
However, the sky is only understood visually, and
typical astronomy books are not very helpful to the reader
to finding their
way
around the sky.
Our goal at Fourth Day Press is to create a series of user-friendly
astronomy
books
and
curricula
that
present
the
visual appearances
of the sky in a visual medium, relying heavily on
illustrations that depict the actual scenes that
a reader might
expect to see.
We seek to promote Classical Astronomy, the
traditional approach to understanding the sky, as it had
been understood
from ancient times through about the mid-19th century. The
popular media today is full of Modern Astronomy,
featuring black holes, big bangs and related "space
cadet" topics.
We hope
to restore an historical understanding of the forgotten
sky, to the greater glory of God.
It is our hope that our initial offering, Signs & Seasons,
will be the first book in a trilogy of
elementary Classical Astronomy homeschool curricula. We also
envision a second
trilogy of
advanced Classical Astronomy books. Our readers will be surprised
at how much there is to know about the forgotten sky! Should
the LORD see fit to bless us, we also hope to develop other
books and products, related
to astronomy and to many other subjects.
About the Ryan Family
The Ryan Family - 2003
|
We're Jay and Debbie Ryan and
we live in Cleveland, Ohio with our five children.
We've been homeschooling our kids since
they were
babies. We follow
the classical approach
to homeschooling, and are very "eclectic" in our
selection of curricula.
If you think about it, nearly all
parents start out as homeschool parents. Most Moms and
Dads teach their children their ABCs,
colors, how to count, and other such things. However, many
parents who "go with the flow" send their five-year-old
kids off to school, and thereafter delegate their children's
education to someone else. But just as it is a joy and a blessing
to see a young child learn to read and count at home, even
greater joys await homeschool parents as older kids learn Algebra,
Latin or other increasingly complex ideas at home!
The Ryan Family enjoys learning about God's
creation and so science is a popular subject in our house.
We love hiking
through the lush woodlands of the excellent Cleveland Metroparks
system. We enjoy the creek gorges and other glacial formations
prevalent throughout Northern Ohio. We are members of the
historic Cleveland Zoo, and make several trips each year.
And in warm summer evenings, we enjoy watching the Sun set
over Lake Erie. Our sons belong to Cub Scout Pack
777 and Boy Scout Troop 777, where many Christian families
in our circle of friends are also involved.
About the Author
 Jay
Ryan is a poor sinner, saved by God's grace in 1980. Jay has
a BS degree in physics but is completely self-taught
in astronomy. He has studied at length the traditional astronomy
of the Greeks and has read the "great
books" of
astronomy, including works by Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy,
Kopernik, Galileo,
Kepler and Newton.
Jay has been involved in popular astronomy
writing since 1995.
For five years, he had been a Contributing Editor to Sky & Telescope magazine,
creating the SkyWise comic strip. He is also the
author of Cycles: An Introduction to Astronomy and Time,
an educational comic book used in high schools
and colleges around the USA and beyond, with
over 40,000 copies currently in print.
Jay now devotes his
work for the benefit of to Christian readers, particularly
homeschoolers, to the greater glory of God. Since 2002,
he has written the Classical Astronomy Update email newsletter
for Christian homeschool families. He has
also written astronomy and other homeschool-related articles
for Homeschooling Today, Homeschool Enrichment,
and The
Old Schoolhouse magazines. He is a frequent contributor
to the homeschool channel at Crosswalk.com.
His article The
Astronomy of Easter was picked as one
of the Crosswalk Top 6 homeschool articles for 2006.
|
