Homeschool History/Culinary Arts: Homemade Chocolate

The teenager's Honors World History: Ancient Times study (2 semesters; 2 high school credits) is a LOT of work, because we're using two college textbooks as the spine for this DIY course:

• Duiker's World History
• Gardner's Art through the Ages

This homemade chocolate project is relevant to Duiker Chapter 6, "The New World," and Gardner Chapter 14, "From Alaska to the Andes: The Arts of Ancient America." It also builds context with our study of Mesoamerica, and trip to the Yucatan Peninsula, from two years ago. We discussed the Ancient Maya's relationship to chocolate then--our local university's art museum actually has a Maya vessel that still has the dregs of ancient hot chocolate inside!--but we didn't do any hands-on chocolate-making projects during that particular study.

Yay, because it gives us something new to do this year!

This TED-Ed video about the history of chocolate is surprisingly thorough for being less than five minutes long, and since our study of chocolate is mostly contained to the Ancient Maya, it builds context by centering chocolate within world history:

If you'd rather your student read than watch, here's about the same level of content as informational text from the Exploratorium.

For our hands-on project, I bought this Make Your Own Chocolate kit from Glee Gum--the kids and I have actually done this exact same kit before, but since it was a whopping ELEVEN YEARS AGO(?!?!), I figured we might as well give it another go!

The kit is marketed to and suitable for young kids like my own long-ago wee ones, but it's actually quite suitable for this nearly-grown teenager and fully-grown me, as well--as long as you're a beginner chocolatier, I suppose. If you can temper chocolate in your sleep this kit probably wouldn't cover much new ground for you, but the teenager and I didn't find the instructions or the activity babyish or overly simplified. 

And look! We got to taste real cacao beans!

The kit is sort of like a Hello Fresh for chocolate-making, in that it provides the ingredients in the amounts needed, and then you heat and combine them as directed. I especially liked the sticker thermometer for easily taking the temperature of the chocolate. My teenager was more than capable of completing the entire project independently, so all I had to do was hang out, take photos, add weird mix-ins to the candy wrappers, and then enjoy all of the chocolate!

For mix-ins, we tried various combinations of candied ginger, dried unsweetened cherries, and peanut butter. The latter two in the same truffle was my favorite combo.

If you wanted to extend this activity even further, there are a ton of ways you could go:

If you live within driving distance, Hershey's Chocolate World in Hershey, Pennsylvania, would be a fun, educational-ish trip. They mostly want to sell you things, but if you're thoughtful, you can make the things that they sell you work as enrichment. We didn't visit The Hershey Story on our own trip, but it looks much more legitimately educational, ahem.

If your kid gets really into the foodcrafting part of the experience, you can buy more of the same ingredients from the kit and make more chocolate from scratch. Kid-made homemade truffles or chocolate bars would be such a lovely Valentine's Day project or handmade gift!

Another super fun but low-effort chocolate crafting project is coating random foods in chocolate. Chocolate-covered gummy bears ARE surprisingly delicious, as are sour gummy worms, mint leaves, and, um... Ramen noodles.

If you're working with a young kid, and don't want to mess around too much with molten chocolate, you could make them a batch of edible chocolate slime for a fun sensory extension activity. Or make modeling chocolate, which sculpts well and is also delicious!

Here are some books that pair well with making your own chocolate:

• The Bitter Side of Sweet. Pair this with any chocolate study to bring insight and empathy to the serious problem of child enslavement that plagues modern chocolate production. 
• The Book of Chocolate. This is a very readable history for apt middle grades and up. 
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It's not for the history buff, ahem, but it's perfect if you're doing the kit just to have fun with candy. If you've never read this book aloud to your kids, are you even a homeschooler?
• Chocolate Fever. Yes, it's a children's book, but it's really, really good! Find an audiobook version that you can listen to while you do some of this food crafting, and you can probably get through the entire book in one session.
• Making Chocolate: From Beans to Bar to S'more. This book is a completely excessive tome about making chocolate from scratch, but if you've got an older kid who's interested... well, you're homeschoolers for a reason!

P.S. Want to know more about all the weird math I have my kids do, as well as our other wanderings and wonderings? Check out my Facebook page!

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.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, home improvement projects, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Homeschool High School Chemistry: Electrolysis of Water Lab

Another day, another kitchen table chemistry lab!

I don't know what the "proper" number of hands-on labs a high school student usually conducts in a non-AP Science class is (in her year of public school Honors Biology, my own teenager conducted one), but in our homeschool high school honors science classes, I try for at least ten high-quality labs, experiments, and/or demonstrations, all written up by the student in her lab notebook for that subject. 

And they don't have to be complicated! This Electrolysis of Water lab could be conducted by an early elementary student, it's so simple. It takes just minutes, and it's easy as pie to conduct at the kitchen table.

To make it appropriate for a high school Honors Chemistry lab, just add rigor! When she completed this lab, my teenager was studying Lewis Electron-Dot Structures and calculating chemical reaction formulas, so I wrote her Post-Lab Questions to require her to practice these skills in a real-world environment.

In AP Language and Literature, she's looking deeper into the etymologies of words, so I also included a question about that to build context. 

Here's the set-up for the lab (pretend that you don't see the erasable pen that my teenagers like to use to cheat the lab notebook system of "write in pen; no erasing"):

Salting the water to the proper ratio (feel free to admire the chopstick stirring rod...):

Attaching the wires to the battery (the electrodes are currently touching, but she'll fix that as soon as she notices):

And now... observation! I always think that this is the coolest, most magical demonstration. Look at all the bubbles!

A surprise to us all: we didn't expect the aluminum to start flaking away! 

Is it an aluminum oxide coating on the foil? A manufacturing flaw resulting in improper adhesion of the aluminum that weakens it?

My favorite thing about science is the way that new information inspires new questions!

If that's not enough electrolysis for you, here are a few extension activities:

• incorporate Snap Circuits. I actually thought pretty hard about incorporating part of this demonstration, because we have sooooo many Snap Circuits. This would be an especially good extension if your focus is actually on electricity. 
• incorporate a pH indicator. This is a neat addition, especially if you've recently studied pH. Red cabbage pH indicator is another excellent homeschool DIY project!
• clean iron. The Children's Museum of Indianapolis has a giant electrolysis tank where you can observe the real-time process of rust removal from one of Captain Kidd's cannons, so you can observe this real-world bit of science in action even if you don't have your own iron to clean via electrolysis.

And here are a couple of books that include similar electrolysis experiments. The Marie Curie book is even written TO middle-grade kids!

And there you have it: excellent science using household materials in just a few minutes. With that little time spent on the actual lab, you've got plenty of room to really ramp up the rigor of the post-lab questions!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, road trips, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Homeschool Chemistry of Cooking: Gelation and Spherification

 

Gelling and spherification are good hands-on activities when you're studying proteins, as it's the unfolding of proteins that allows the hydrophobic amino acids to cross-link and form a gel.

You can even look up the exact amino acids that make up the gelatin (probably glycine), and you can model those amino acids. You can also chemically test foods for proteins, if you want to make your study as hands-on and context-building as possible.

Syd and I have been working through this Harvard EdX class, Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science, and that's where we learned how spherification works. When cooking, you gotta love your polymers!  

Although the process that Syd and I used does result in spherified liquids, this isn't exactly the type of spherification that occurs in fancy molecular gastronomy restaurants. There, they use alginate and calcium to build that gel layer only around the outside of what they want spherified, leaving the inside as liquid.

These gel spheres are a solution of liquid and gelatin, and we used physical processes to shape them. 

Syd and I found a really easy-to-follow recipe for making edible spheres in The Complete Cookbook for Young Scientists, written by America's Test Kitchen, but they've actually also put the complete recipe here. It involves lots of fun stuff, like nuking pomegranate juice and unflavored gelatin--

--whisking it (tiny whisk optional but encouraged!)--

--prepping some VERY cold vegetable oil--

--and using a squeeze bottle to drop the solution into the cold oil:

Rinse the oil off, and you've got tiny, edible spheres of pomegranate gelatin!

The process IS very interesting, but alas, Syd and I both thought that the edible spheres were super gross. We never did get every minute speck of oil rinsed away, so they definitely felt oily, and they'd lost a lot of sweetness, as well. 

If you ever could get all the oil rinsed off, I think that these edible spheres would be fun as ice cream toppers, or even as a boba substitute in tea. For us, though, we marveled at our cross-linked polymer chains enabled by the heat-activated unfolding of proteins to reveal the hydrophobic amino acid components...

... and then we fed them to the chickens.