Alchemy: A High School Chemistry/Geometry/World History Combo Study

We use CK-12's Chemistry for High School textbook as the teenager's spine for Honors Chemistry, with, of course, our own lab component added and a LOT of supplementation. 

We started supplementing right in Chapter 1, when we added a short study of alchemy to the textbook's brief history of chemistry.

I think that most teenagers find the concept of alchemy interesting--it's mystical and a little spooky, and it's very, very incorrect. Teenagers have SO much fun learning about adults who were incorrect!

Unfortunately, there really aren't a ton of great resources about alchemy that work well for a high school/undergrad readership, and there are a TON of contemporary, fantastical, and otherwise ahistorical resources that muddy up any kind of student-led research. 

Therefore, this study of alchemy was necessarily a short one, able to be completed within 1-2 hours. You could draw out the art component further, of course, by requiring a more polished piece that used a larger vocabulary of alchemical symbols and moves, but this brief afternoon's work was enough for our own purposes.

After reading the relevant material in the CK-12 Chemistry for High School textbook, my teenager and I watched this Crash Course History of Science episode (if your student isn't studying History of Science as a discrete topic, I highly recommend reviewing the playlist and adding applicable videos to their science/history syllabi as interdisciplinary enrichment):

Crash Course videos tend to be meaty, so it might be worth going over it a couple of times to make sure you absorb all the info.

After the video, my teenager and I looked through a number of alchemical illustrations and excerpts from alchemy books from alchemy's heyday. This Getty Research Institute's virtual exhibit is a treasure! Click on the link in the caption of most of the images to be taken to the digitized version of that book, which you can then flip through to find other interesting images and text. 

The teenager practiced her close reading to notice all the details in each piece of artwork, and used semiotic analysis to attempt to interpret the pieces. But also take time to notice how lovely each piece, is, as well; alchemy artwork is ART!

Using these pieces and some reference books, we then spent some time playing around with creating our own artwork that had (or looked like it had, lol!), alchemical meaning. The nature of the pieces also meant that the teenager could use the works she created as process pieces in her geometry art portfolio: 

Check out the accurate geometric shapes and the overall balance of the piece! DON'T check out my noisy digitization of the work; I really need to learn how to clean up art when I scan it, sigh...

That was as far as we took this particular lesson, but here's some further reading appropriate for an interested high school student:

• Alchemy: The Great Secret. This is a fairly accessible history for those who watched the Crash Course video but would like to learn more.
• Alchemy: An Illustrated A to Z. I wouldn't use this as a textbook supplement, but it was an excellent art reference. 
• Alchemy and Mysticism: The Hermetic Museum. Most of the text was beyond me, but it has tons of art to reference.

My favorite thing about alchemy is how it sits just next to being correct; like, they were wrong about the Sun and the Moon and dragon's blood and the mystical marriage of lead and tin, but while they were drawing their allegorical wedding feasts and busily melting silver in little pots, they were butting up against the actual chemistry that alchemy would evolve into. What they did reads now as adorably naive just because we know better, but these people were actually pretty bad-ass wizard scientists.

They also for sure all had lead poisoning, which explains a LOT of their artwork.

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The Poured Rice Fantasy Map Project

I've seen the poured rice fantasy maps being made on Tiktok and YouTube, but my actual inspiration for this project was subbing in an art class in which the kids were hard at work on their own fantasy maps. They'd already done the poured rice step and were deep into embellishing their maps with fantasy and cartography elements. Their teacher had a long list of categories and a Google Slide Deck of reference images for them to use, and I spent two days in that class walking around and cooing over everyone's maps, encouraging them to add elements from a new category, debating river placement and what kinds of sea monsters are the scariest and how many volcanoes one island can reasonably contain.

You know who else is currently writing a fantasy novel AND loves art? My very own homeschooler!

For a Creative Writing/Studio Art enrichment lesson one day, she and I sat down with some large-format drawing paper, our eight-year-old kilogram of rice, and my favorite drawing pens (these are the teenager's favorite drawing pens). 

To make the map, you simply pour out your rice (I've seen some people use lentils, but I loved all the fjordy bits that the rice made)--

--then trace around it!

You can, of course, artificially manipulate the rice to spread it however you want, but the idea is that by letting it do its thing you make a map that looks organic and random and has a particularly detailed coastline.

After that, you listen to music, and you draw!

The teenager was quite happy with creating from her own brain, but I preferred to use reference images. Here's the teenager trying to show me how to draw cliffs like Dover:

I kind of got the idea, but I couldn't make it look good on the map. Oh, well--at least my barrows look awesome!

It's impossible to do any work whatsoever without Mr. Jones being actively weird in your face:

The art class kids who were spending several days on this project had to add a billion details, a compass rose, and a banner title, but the teenager and I were satisfied with our maps after just a couple of hours hanging out together, drawing and listening to music. Here's my fantastic fantasy map:

A henge is OBVIOUSLY at the center of my island, with various barrows around the outskirts. My snowcapped mountains are an embarrassment, but I'm quite proud of my road and my swampland. 

And here is the teenager's. She packed a LOT of detail into just a couple of hours!

I LOVE that her map also has a henge! All the Giant Rocks Day is such a good memory!

I'd suggested that the teenager might want to use her fantasy map as THE map for her fantasy novel, but she preferred to make it just a fantastical fantasy of a map, no lore included. But it did get her thinking about geography and place in her story, so I'm keeping this project as a cross-curricular Creative Writing/Studio Art effort.

If a kid is up for an entire world-building experience, I do think it would be cool to actually make this map in coordination with creative writing, perhaps adding new features to the map as you think of them for a story, and vice versa. Otherwise, this project lends itself to all kinds of geography extensions, from basic map-reading to AP Human Geography. Or make up your own coordinate system and then locate places on the map using it! Model the terrain in salt dough! Photocopy the outline and create a political map showing population and government! Invent a flag, then sew it! Find a partner who also created a map, pretend their island is in the same world, and form a political alliance... or declare war! 

This was our eight-year-old kilogram of rice's final act of service. It began its time as a sensory material, lived most of its life as a kid-measured exact kilogram for admiration and reference, and after this, its last hurrah as an implement of cartographic creation, it was ceremoniously retired around the backyard, where it can end its days by offering sustenance and enrichment to our flock of half-wild chickens.

It's only now occurring to me to wonder if whatever I used to dye that rice eight years ago is okay for chickens to eat now. OMG ISN'T A THING THAT BIRDS AREN'T ACTUALLY SUPPOSED TO EAT DRY RICE?

You know what? Whatever, I'm sure it's fine. If you come back to my blog and find this post deleted, though, it's because I accidentally killed our flock of chickens and I need to cover my tracks.

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AP Studio Art: Taking Reference Photos in the Cemetery

Syd needs several hundred reference photos to use in her AP studio art classes, so we've been taking lots of little field trips out and about lately, in search of interesting places with lots of interesting things to photograph there. 

While Syd roamed around a local cemetery the other day, taking photos of things she might want to reference in her art someday, I roamed around, too, stayed out of her way, and took my own photos:

One of my Girl Scouts told me recently about the multi-faceted artistic tool that is "portrait mode" on one's cell phone camera, so that's what I'm experimenting with. I think she's quite correct!

Found a Freemason:

Found a fellow photographer!

Limestone used to be a major local industry, so the older cemeteries have lots of examples of masterful and detailed carving:

Once upon a time, a sapling was planted in between the graves of two departed lovers...

I would rather my corpse be tossed into a ditch than interred in a cemetery, but I wouldn't say no to a limestone memorial to my love of reading!

Our town thinks it has an urban deer problem, so much so that every now and then the city council will pay some of our hard-earned tax money to hire either hunters to shoot them down or other hunters to shoot them with birth control. I think it's absurd, but to be fair, it was a little disconcerting to see a couple of deer wandering around the cemetery in broad daylight, as brazen as squirrels:

It's too bad that the camera on Syd's ipod touch isn't great, because I can see that a cell phone camera is obviously the ideal tool for taking reference photos. It's probably better for her overall artistic growth, though, to increase her familiarity with my DSLR.

I'll be very curious to see if Syd finds these reference photos useful during her AP studio art work. She doesn't think she will, but collecting them is a strong recommendation for the courses, so that's what she's doing. I guess we'll both just be happily surprised if they happen to come in handy!