Homeschool High School Chemistry: A Historical and Artistic Look at the Periodic Tables of the Elements

Twenty-ish years ago, when I was studying for my Master's in Library Science, I took a class entitled The Organization and Representation of Knowledge and Information.

It was... just as fussy and pedantic of a class as you'd imagine from the title. I thought my instructor was fussy and pedantic, I thought the structure of the assignments was fussy and pedantic, and after two or three years of English grad school by that time, I found the endless class debates over the philosophy of how to organize and represent some specific piece of knowledge or information to be just the worst kind of parody of grad school education.

I just looked, and the school DOES still offer that exact class, but the syllabus is completely different! It looks so practical now! I might have come out of that class with a genuinely marketable skill, dang it!

ANYWAY, I was not my best self in that class (actually, I might have been in the early stages of pregnancy in that class, now that I think if it. Wonder if that had anything to do with my mindset, ahem?), and the only thing that I really remember from it is that there are infinite ways to organize and represent knowledge and information. The trick is to figure out the best one!

So when my teenager and I took what I knew would be the last of our numerous pass-throughs of the Periodic Table of the Elements this past school year, I decided to shake up our usual look at the Table as an unquestioned artifact by instead exploring its history, and some of the MANY variations the structure has taken in the quest to find the absolutely most perfect iteration. 

This was a great topic to move into soon after our lesson on alchemy, because scientists have been trying to organize the elements since before the only elements were earth, air, water, and fire! Here's one of the beautiful tables that we looked at first:

Tria Prima image via Mark R. Leach

Most of our Periodic Tables were taken from the Internet Database of Periodic Tables run by Mark R. Leach. With every table that we looked at, it was interesting to discuss why that table was arranged the way it was--what organizational problems it tried to solve, what patterns it tried to create--as well as what organizational issues that table caused, leading to yet another iteration. And of course one mustn't neglect the artistic merits of each table!

The teenager and I are both hands-on learners, so, for instance, we both liked this table from 1814:

Wollaston's Physical Slide Rule of Chemical Equivalents image via Mark R. Leach

It's a Periodic Table because it's ordered based on the weights of the elements, but you can see why it would be somewhat impractical for many purposes. What schoolchild could afford it? Who could manage carrying it around for ready reference?

Emerson's Helix from 1911 is prettier, and much more practical to put one's hands on:

Emerson's Helix image via Mark R. Leach

But you can already see it's not going to work with as many elements as we have today.

THIS Periodic Table of the Elements, though--THIS one really gets into the meat of what personally interests me about how the elements are organized:

Rare Earth Pop Out Periodic Table image via Mark R. Leach

There is just not a practical way--one that also makes sense!--to get all those elements into one nice, neat, lined-up table. Something always wants to stick out!

I really like this 3D pyramid from 1983; it's organized so that each side represents one type of atomic orbital... mostly. 

Or you can organize the elements based on your own usage of them: this 3D cube has the elements sized "in approximate proportion to their importance in cement chemistry."

And to be honest, I can't work out how this table from 2008 even works, or how one is meant to read it:

Angular Form of the Periodic Table image via Mark R. Leach

It's VERY pretty, though! I would happily work it as a puzzle!

Since, alas, we do not have an Angular Form of the Periodic Table puzzle, we happily reworked our good old 1,000-piece PTOE puzzle that we've reworked many times before--

I had thought that it might interest the teenager to create an art piece organizing the elements in any unique way that she chose--a Minecraft creation, perhaps, or a menagerie. A PowerPoint organized by vibes. A series of ceramic vessels. She wasn't feeling inspired by the prompt, though--it's possible that I've brought up the PTOE maybe a couple of too many times over the past 12 years, ahem--and part of the fun of being a homeschooler who chooses your own adventures is also NOT choosing adventures, so an artistic, unique Periodic Table did not become part of her Art of Chemistry portfolio.

Instead, we colored ourselves anchor charts of the table that we've all agreed to know and love today, internalizing, as we did, how this particular knowledge and information is organized and represented:

While we worked we listened to The Disappearing Spoon on audiobook, because I'll be damned if I don't sneak in just a LITTLE more Periodic Table content before this last year of homeschooling ends!

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Homeschool High School Honors World History: DIY Art History Artwork Cards

The teenager's Honors World History: Ancient Times course uses an AP World History textbook, a college-level art history textbook, and all the other additional resources you'd want in order to flesh the study of ancient history out into a full-year high school honors course.

Among the other many resources I've compiled and DIYed for this study, one of my favorites is the new set of DIY artwork cards that I prepare for every new chapter of Gardner's Art through the Ages, which in turn I've keyed to the relevant chapter(s) in Duiker's World History. 

Artwork cards are a major component of a couple of different pedagogical approaches to homeschooling, and you CAN buy sets of them--Memoria Press is generally considered to have the nicest, if you're in the market. But if you buy sets of them you're not going to get exactly the artworks that you want in the sizes that you want, and depending on where you buy them, copyright can be an issue. 

Another option, one that I also use, is buying museum gift shop postcards. I LOVE my sets of artwork postcards, and it's nice because they're always high-quality, I know they're not pirated, and I didn't have to do any of the work of sourcing, printing, and cutting out the images. But they're hard to buy online, and they're pricey! I would NOT have the collection of artwork cards that I do if I was paying a buck-plus for each of them. I mean, geez, my kid is going through twenty or so of these cards per chapter in just her current study! And that's not even counting the separate political art or history of photography studies that we've completed fairly recently, yikes.

So you've got options, but if you want the highest-quality, cheapest, most bespoke sets of artwork cards, you probably want to DIY them like I do. 

Step 1: Go through the study materials and select the images you require. 

I always pre-read the kid's textbook chapters so that I can collect additional resources and set up extension activities anyway, so while I'm reading her art history textbook I also note the artworks that are referred to in that chapter. Occasionally, there are also a couple that her history textbook refers to that the art history textbook doesn't, or I might want to collect different types of images referenced there, like the cuneiform tablets from the Mesopotamia chapter, or the Neolithic stoneworks from the Ancient Great Britain section. 

Step 2: Find the images online and save them.

There are three ways to find good images online. First is just to do a Google Image search and filter the results for Large images:

This is a screenshot from when I was collecting images for our History of Photography study, but the process is identical.

You'll often come across pirated images this way, but you're not using your images commercially, so I'll allow it, ahem. 

Another good way is a Wikipedia search, especially for more iconic artworks. You won't get any pirated images here, but you WILL get some lower-quality images, as many will be photos that contributors took themselves of the artworks in their museum settings. 

And then ANOTHER good way is to go directly to the website of the museum that hosts a particular artwork. A lot of museums do offer free downloads of digital images of many of their artworks. My special favorite is the British Museum, which will often let me download an image so high-quality that I can print it life-sized--I've done that for both the Rosetta stone and for several cuneiform and hieroglyphic pieces, and it's so cool and useful for detailed study! 

Here's one list of museums that offer open-source images, but it's definitely not comprehensive because the British Museum isn't even on it. 

Here's the British Museum's image site; I usually download or request the super-high-quality images, because why not! Wouldn't some large-scale Greek vase images look so awesome framed and displayed in my future Life of Theseus-themed bathroom?

Here's the Metropolitan Museum of Art's image site. I like that if you're not looking for a specific artwork, but rather a time period or style, you can filter your results by open-access so that everything you see is obtainable.

The National Gallery's image site provides open-access images and also provides many of the Wikimedia images. 

Here's the National Trust images site. Only some of these images are free, but there are images that work very well with British history and geography studies. 

The Smithsonian's image site pulls from all its museums and holdings across genres, so it's a great resource not just for art, but also historical artifacts and even primary sources. 

Step 3: Print and cut.

I prefer to print my images with a laser printer onto cardstock, because I want them to look and feel nice. To make the artwork cards a standard size, I print them four to a page--

--then cut them on a guillotine paper cutter:

I label the back with title, artist, date, and, for these art history cards, geographic location, and currently I have them filed by textbook chapter.

My teenager is also keeping a comprehensive ancient history timeline, so I print another set of these images as thumbnails onto regular copy paper, and then she glues them into her timeline and labels them. 

Okay, so how do you actually USE these artwork cards? There are so many ways!

• Flash cards. Memorize the artwork, title, artist, date, and geographic location to add to one's working knowledge of art history. Having a ton of artworks memorized will make it easier for you to slot future pieces into your memory, and allow you to build context and make better comparisons/contrasts, add to your understanding of social history, and write some kick-ass essays, etc.
• Sort and organize. Having these visuals at hand allows you to easily make comparisons about style and other features of artworks that may be less noticeable when each image is trapped in the pages of a specific chapter of your textbook. How do the early Native American earthworks compare to Neolithic European ones? How does portraiture vary, and how would you sort portraits stylistically when the images are separated from geohistorical context? 
• Order chronologically. We play a lot of history card games in which we have to try to put something in chronological order. We have almost all of these Timeline games, but you can play the same game with art, and not only is it interesting, but it builds a chronological understanding of art on a sensory level.
• Display. Once upon a time, a worker who was doing emergency repairs on our old, poorly-maintained, homeowner's special home came out of the kids' bathroom after installing a new toilet and asked me if I homeschooled. I was all, "Yes?" I thought it was the weirdest, most random thing for someone to figure out about me with zero evidence! But when I told this story to the kids later, they were immediately all like, "Um, it's because you tape educational posters to the wall facing the toilet?" Because riiiiight... when I want the kids to memorize something but I don't want to go through the emotional torment of MAKING them memorize something, I just print that thing out onto 8.5"x11" paper and tape it to the wall facing their toilet. I also once put tape onto ALL our things and made the kids label them in French and that's all still around, and every once in a while I printed out and assembled a giant line map of someplace we were studying, made them label that, too, and then hung it in the hallway until I was ready to make them study some other place. I also use pushpins to make little clotheslines across our bookshelves and I have the kids clothespin these art cards to them, and sometimes I'll display them on our magnet boards. I thought I was being sneaky like this, but apparently I wasn't, lol!

I should probably act like, since these images cost only the amount of the paper and the ink, and they're just cardstock, I'll recycle them when my last homeschooling kid graduates in a couple of months, but you know I won't. I won't have the kids to label me new giant maps for the hallway, so perhaps I'll retire them all permanently on display there!

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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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Day 10 in England, Part 2: Stonehenge

 

After plane tickets, the first thing that I booked for our England trip were these tickets for access to the interior of Stonehenge--right off the top of the budget, with everything else filled in around it. It's what I was most excited about, a truly once-in-my-lifetime-so-far experience, and I'm just gonna go ahead and tell you right now that it was EVERYTHING I'd hoped it would be. As in, I'd hoped that it would be the most magical experience of my life, the most awesome thing I've ever done, the most special family activity anyone could ever plan, and I'd take the absolute most coolest photos there, and I'd marvel at the size of the stones and the mystery of their purpose and their construction and I would have SO. MUCH. FUN. 

Goal achieved!

We drove straight to Stonehenge from Avebury, and arrived exactly on time. With these evening tickets, you're allowed onto the site an hour before it closes so you can explore the museum, but the site actually closes to day ticket entries two hours before it officially closes, so we had to show our booking to get past the blockade... which may have given all the cars behind us hope, as they all stopped trying to turn around before the blockade and instead got in line behind us and made the security guard have to turn each of them away personally, oops. 

One hour was NOT enough time to see the Stonehenge museum, but I was able to make myself stare at everything more quickly than I usually like to stare at everything, so I managed.

My favorite part of the museum was this set of sculptures that showed Stonehenge during its various stages of construction. It was used from the Mesolithic period, perhaps around 8000 BCE based on radiocarbon dating of giant posts that were constructed then, through the Middle Bronze Age, perhaps around 1600 BCE. For that entire time, people were changing up Stonehenge--adding stones and ditches and barrows and pits, moving stones to different locations, carving the stones, burying people and things, etc. Below is a sculpture of Stonehenge at what was probably its most elaborate formation, around 2500 BCE. In the middle is a horseshoe of five giant trilithons, encircled by a ring of 30 sarsen stones topped with lintels. There's a double row of smaller bluestones standing between the two sets, and some of those bluestones have evidence that something was also on top of them--more lintels, perhaps? More sarsens, now called the Station Stones, were arranged singularly at various points, including that one lying in front of the tallest trilithon.

Important note: I didn't frame the compass rose in my photo, but north isn't at the top. The winter solstice sunset is at the top!

And here's Stonehenge as it looks today. There's a terrific aerial photo in Stonehenge: Making Sense of a Prehistoric Mystery, in which you can actually see the location of the missing stones as "parchmarks," or brown spots, in the grass. The existence of a giant standing stone changed the soil composition so the grass doesn't grow as nicely there!

I got the compass rose in this one! North points right-ish.

Here's another excellent map of Stonehenge, with links that give you a close-up view of every individual stone.

The entire area around Stonehenge was clearly significant, as well, and the museum had an excellent large-screen film that showed the various dates of construction of all the various barrows and cursi and henges in the region, many of which you can still visit, and some of which are on English Heritage property. 

Happily, the outdoor part of the museum (and the gift shop!) remained accessible after Stonehenge closed to day ticket holders, so I was able to keep myself entertained by exploring how the Neolithic peoples around Stonehenge might have lived:

Here are some of the other important sites in the area.

Finally, an hour after the museum closed to day ticketholders, 30 of us got on a bus with our guide to drive across the site to Stonehenge. Included in our group was another family with kids, various tourists from other countries and across the UK, a couple who'd brought several instruments that they wanted to film each other playing within the stones, and a large group, maybe half of the total, who wanted to stand in a circle and meditate and chant together inside the stones. 

One thing that I didn't realize until our bus arrived at the site is that you can actually get a pretty good view of Stonehenge for free. The A303 drives right past it, complete with congested traffic since everyone slows down to look, and there's another small road--Willoughby Road, I think?--that intersects the site, with a walking path to a viewing point that's just outside the fenced-in area.

Also? People were living on the side of this road! There were a couple of permanent tents, and a bunch of campers, all along the roadside, where they just live within sight of Stonehenge. This is very historically accurate, actually, as archaeological evidence points to some type of community that lived around Stonehenge at various times during its original prominence.

I was taking a photo of the Stonehenge Cursus, but you can see a few of the tents and campers on Willoughby Rd. There were a ton more to the left of the frame.

Here's my view of the overall Stonehenge site while we got our lecture on not touching or climbing on the stones:

It was incredibly hard to stay oriented, but I think we're standing southwest of the stones.

We're northwest of the stones, I think. Later, when I'm taking photos of everyone silhouetted by the sunset, I'll be framing them either within that inner trilithon with the narrow gap, or within that sarsen stone with the intact lintel. We're only about a month out from the Summer Solstice!

Selfie mode! I'm a little southeast of Stonehenge, with the tallest standing stone that was once part of the center trilithon of the Horseshoe over my left shoulder. 

Lecture internalized, we were set free to step over the fencing and walk as we wished among the stones!

Trilithon, with a sarsen and its lintel behind it. 

I'm off-center, but this is a view from the center of Stonehenge, through the intact parts of the sarsen circle, to the Heel Stone that marks the location of sunrise on the Summer Solstice. To get the perfect view of the sunrise, you'd want to frame the Heel Stone through the center opening, not the left one as I've done.

I think she's looking at the remaining standing stone of what would have been the tallest trilithon in the inner horseshoe, with an intact trilithon beyond it.

Trilithon from the inner horseshoe, some intact sarsens from the outer circle, and a couple of intact bluestones.

I'm standing in the center, looking northeast towards the sunset. 

The openings in the trilithons that make up the inner horseshoe are quite narrow; they're much wider in the outer sarsen circle.

Looking south, with Bluestones from the inner circle, a trilithon from the Horseshoe, and a sarsen stone from the outer circle.

This stone is very special! See the line of carved graffiti, which probably dates from sometime in the 1600s? Below that are carvings of daggers that date from probably 1750-1500 BCE. There are just a very few examples of original carvings here, and it's theorized that these are meant to be viewed with similar carvings on a sarsen to its north to point towards the southern major moonrise. 

This was formerly one of the uprights of the tallest trilithon in the horseshoe, but it's fallen towards the center and broken into two pieces. It's been extensively graffitied with carvings over the centuries, and it's heavily damaged by tourists who've hammered pieces off of it.

The lintel of the trilithon that Matt is looking at actually fell in 1797, and lay on the ground until its restoration in 1958.

Southeast trilithon, with a seated Julie for scale!

These uprights are really cool, because you can see that the Neolithic people carved the uprights and lintels with mortise and tenon joints. There's even a lintel with mortises carved on both sides, presumably because they messed up the spacing on one side, so they just flipped it over and tried again on the other side!

This is the tallest standing stone at Stonehenge, at 22'7" to the top of the tenon. It would have paired with the stone next to it, now fallen, to make the tallest trilithon at the center of the horseshoe.

The sun is beginning to set behind the northwesternmost remaining part of the sarsen outer circle! The lintel and one of the uprights fell in 1900, and the lintel broke in half. It was repaired and restored in the 1950s. 

Selfie with a southeast Sarsen!

Tallest standing stone, with teenager for scale.

The sun beginning to set behind the western stones was my favorite part of our time inside Stonehenge. You see how many photos I have just of the stones, right? Now imagine about ten times that many family photos, with my patient family staged in various poses and groupings, framed interestingly silhouetted by the sunset and the stones, every time I could catch them. Send thoughts and prayers to the teenager, especially, who was required to utilize the several thousand dollars I've spent on her ballet training to leap and do other pretty dancer things while I photographed her. She can count herself lucky that our luggage constraints meant I couldn't require her to bring a pair of old pointe shoes for additional poses!

Looking northeast at the shadow of the Sarsen Circle.

The northeast section contains the longest remaining intact portion of the Sarsen Circle.

Looking east towards the two intact trilithons on the south side of the horseshoe, with the shadow of the one other intact trilithon and the tallest standing stone. Delighted Julie posed for scale!

Looking southeast towards the A303. I love this photo of Matt in the shadow of the Sarsen Circle!

We wandered the inner circle for about an hour, then finally our Day of Giant Rocks was over. Fortunately, our inn was just a few minutes away, and dinnertime was just a few minutes after that!

Here is a glass of water that is noticeable because of the American-sized portion of ICE!!! The American obsession with ice is because we've always had access to so much of it, what with our Great Lakes to the north that supported an industry of harvesting ice, packing it in sawdust, and sending it south. Countries that didn't have this kind of access never got accustomed to icy beverages, and now they think we're weird.

Actually, it was a running joke during our entire trip that England apparently places little value on hydration in general. The one time that Matt asked for a refill of his Coke in a restaurant the waiter looked so visibly disturbed that as soon as he left the rest of us were all, "OMG that was so embarrassing you can never do that again!" It turned out that the secret was just to order a hard cider instead of a soft drink. Refills of cider are socially approved!

We also had a little lesson in British food that we honestly probably should have already known. Some of us ordered pizza, and it came out looking like this and tasted absolutely delicious.

I demolished this pizza. It was so good! The little container of ranch was another funny American touch. They really wanted me to feel at home!

This, however, is my poor teenager's order of "nachos."

She has tortilla chips, a little bit of queso, a sweet(!) meat sauce, then little containers of sour cream, a kind of guacamole, and a tomato sauce that a nod to salsa. And five peppers sans heat. Her dismay was probably very similar to what European tourists to America feel when they eat at, say, an Olive Garden. 

The serving board was beautiful, though!

• Day 1: We made it to England!
• Day 2: Westminster Abbey, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Six
• Day 3: British Museum and Buckingham Palace
• Day 4: Mudlarks and Southwark
• Day 5: Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum
• Day 6: Pax Lodge, the Tower of London, and Afternoon Tea
• Day 7: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich
• Day 8: We Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach
• Day 9: Dover, Hastings, and a Holloway
• Day 10, Part 1: All the Giant Rocks
• Day 10, Part 2: Stonehenge, At Last!
• Day 11: To Avalon with King Arthur
• Day 12: Tintagel
• Day 13: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning
• Day 14: Homewards!