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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Homeschool AP US History: A Family Field Trip to the Levi and Catharine Coffin House

 

Can I still call it a homeschool field trip if there's only one homeschooler in attendance?

Sadder question: will I still be able to call it a homeschool field trip when there are NO more homeschoolers in attendance? SOB!

For the moment, though, it's eyes forward, because I have one homeschooler in attendance, and that homeschooler is taking a deep dive into the Underground Railroad.

The worst thing about the AP history courses is they absolutely FLY through the material. The older kid's AP European History study crammed information into her so quickly that we had very little time to build context and make real-world connections, and to be honest, it shows in her middling retention of the material five years later.

I've addressed that problem with my younger kid by, in the case of her World History course, abandoning AP altogether and instead creating our own study, laser-focused on Ancient History, from the recommended college textbooks, and in the case of this AP US History course, focusing very little on exam prep and using that extra time to enjoy more immersive studies of select topics.

Such as the Underground Railroad! The kid has long been interested in the experiences of the freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad (thank you, Addy Walker!), and thankfully, located as we are in southern Indiana, we're within driving distance of several locations important to freedom seekers and relevant to the history of enslavement on American soil. 

But somehow, until Winter Break, we'd never been to the Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad itself, the Levi and Catharine Coffin House!

Possibly because it's low-key in the middle of nowhere, but oh, well--that's why we bought a car with excellent fuel efficiency!

Catharine and Levi Coffin were Quakers, who moved to the Quaker community of Newport (it's now called Fountain City, but I didn't get around to asking why) in 1826. From then until they moved to Cincinnati in 1847, their work assisting freedom seekers on the journey north was an open secret. They evaded bounty hunters who knew there was something going on but could never catch them, and just in case they were caught, they never knew more than one other connection of the Underground Railroad in either direction.

The museum next to the house is just one gallery, but it has some really thoughtful exhibits. I really liked this recreation of the box that Henry Brown shipped himself within:

And we have a pair of shoes from William Bush, handed down through generations of descendants. I LOVE personal artifacts like these, and I think this is an example of why these smaller museums are so important. The bigger museums of the world, the Smithsonians and the American Museums of Natural History and the British Museums, have millions more objects than they know what to do with, so the only stuff that gets displayed is the canonical stuff, the stuff most vital to the understanding of the most people.

But smaller museums can show items that are not so much exemplars of the type, but are more personal, intimate, and meaningful to the local community that the museum serves. I might not give this pair of shoes a second glance if I was looking at them in a Smithsonian museum, nor would they probably be placed on display there, competing, as they would be, with thousands of other similar artifacts in better condition or belonging to better-known people. But knowing that these shoes came from a person involved in the history of this exact place, who worked here, was buried here, and whose descendants still partly live here, is always just the absolute most awesome feeling.

One thing that I didn't love about this museum was the noise level. While I was trying to read the sign below, there were at least two--maybe even three?--other audio things going on in the same gallery, all talking over each other. It might not even be noticeable if the gallery was full of people, but it was just the four of us rattling around in there, and I found the noise level nearly unbearable, yikes!

This map is interesting, though, because these paths to freedom look like they make a point of dodging around that entire south-central area where I live:

It would have been all forests and caves and small towns and pioneer settlements, so I don't get it. Must do more research!

Here's another cool map, this one of the town of Newport. I thought it was interesting that Levi Coffin actually owns a few pieces of property on this map. One is a store that sold only goods manufactured using free labor, but I forgot to ask what that really big piece of property on the far left of the map was. Dang it!

Our guided tour of the actual house was super interesting, and I didn't take more than a couple of photos only because I was too busy stumbling all over myself to pepper the tour guide with question after question. She wasn't prepared to speak about the artifacts in the house, all of which were of the correct era and had been donated by locals (inspiring SO MANY QUESTIONS in my heart!), or really much about the building and architecture of the house itself, but she was very game to answer all of my other questions about local law enforcement, the professions and later lives of the Coffin children and further descendants, the chain of ownership of the home after the Coffins and how it became a museum site, the possible education/literacy level of Catharine Coffin, speculation about what it would look like to make this historic house ADA compliant, what the neighbors might have known about what the Coffins were doing, the general information structure of an Underground Railroad chain, where the kitchen garden might have been located, the actual division of labor regarding caring for freedom seekers (mostly relating to my theory that Catharine did far more hands-on work than Levi did), etc.

This awesome little door, below, looks like it would lead to a little closet, and could easily be hidden by just stacking a couple of boxes or a bed against it, but it leads to a storage area that extends the entire length of that room. People could hide in it if the Coffins thought they were about to be raided. All four of us got a turn to crawl inside and look around:

I also really love this spring-fed cistern. There was no reference to it in any of Coffin's papers, and no physical evidence of it when the house came into the custody of the Indiana State Museum. Excavations uncovered it by surprise. 

It's theorized that the Coffins could use this cistern to collect part of the household water, in addition to the creek that they also used just a few yards from the house. That way, no matter how many people were inside the house, anyone spying on them from the outside would only see people going to the creek to fetch a perfectly normal amount of water perfectly suited to the number of official residents inside the Coffin house:

This was a really great museum and house tour, really interesting and really accessible to a wide range of interests and abilities. We were all completely engaged and fascinated, and afterwards, we spent a very late lunch at the Big Boy and a very dull two-hour car ride back home gossiping about it. I've not also got the Reminiscences of Levi Coffin on my bookshelf, and you know I cannot keep what I'm reading to myself AT ALL so I'm sure we'll all spend even more time gossiping about it in the next few weeks!

Here are a few other things that my teenager and I have done in support of her Underground Railroad study:

• audiobook and discussion of 12 Years a Slave
• trip to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center

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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!

I Read Twelve Years a Slave, and Now I'm Going to Go Spit on Edwin Epps' Grave

I read a bunch of these one-star Goodreads reviews to the family, and we were simultaneously horrified and howling with laughter. People are so hilariously awful!

Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My teenager and I have been listening to this book together as part of her AP US History study, usually listening for an hour or so at a time... but this last time, we listened to two and a half hours together, all the way to the end, in the audiobook equivalent of not being able to put it down because it was so exciting!

The teenager chose this book over both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other possible slave narratives because, frankly, it was the shortest. I'd never read it before, and neither of us have seen the film, so we both came to it fresh. I was interested to see what each of us thought about it, she who's read several children's fictional accounts (shout-out to Addy Walker!) and YA histories about US slavery but nothing this graphic or wrenching, and me who's read fairly widely on the subject, but almost entirely in college classes. We've taken a lot of road trips to Civil War sites, but shamefully few to sites where we could learn about the enslaved. 

Spoiler Alert: OMG this book is EPIC. It is INCREDIBLE. It is distressing, and action-heavy, and suspenseful, and sad. It has vivid characters who I can't get out of my head, villains whose graves should be spat upon, heroes who should have statues made and scholarships founded in their honor, and victims who bring to life the vile nature of enslavement.

Like, seriously. I was shocked at how good this book is! Because it's for my teenager's history course I was prepared to read it even if it was dry or boring or we just didn't enjoy it--I mean, it's school, that's kind of what it's known for! So I was shocked and thrilled that this book is genuinely good, genuinely exciting, genuinely interesting. I saw some people in other reviews griping about having to learn all about how to pick cotton in the book and they didn't like learning about it and thought it was boring. I mean, though... it's high-key NOT?!? If you don't pick cotton right, or don't pick enough of it, you get your ass kicked! And then get your ass kicked more the next day when you can't pick even that much on account of you're injured from getting your ass kicked! And if you're female, you're also getting raped on the regular, and then when the enslaver's wife finds out that her husband is serially raping you, you get your ass kicked for that, too. That... doesn't feel boring to me. It feels uncomfortable, which I'm guessing is what the negative reviewers are actually not liking about Northup's memoir.

Everyone should read this book, and I'd say that ideally they should read it in high school. It's pretty graphic, but the graphic scenes are terrible in the way that graphic scenes ought to be, in that they're in service of telling a very important story. It's not boring, unless you're just completely uninterested in learning about any type of life different from your own. And it's a living testament to the value of human life and the importance of those who give service to help others.

Under the theme of Some People are Incredible but Other People are Terrible, here is a gross bit of backlash to Northup's memoir: 163 years after the publication of Twelve Years a Slave, a person unaffiliated with any academics at all wrote and published a book (through the small press that she owns and serves as the editor, designer, and proofreader for) entitled 200 Years a Fraud, in which she claims that Northup lied about the events of the book? That does make some of the other one-star reviews that were a lot more racist, revisionist, and conspiracy theory-forward make more sense. Here's an excellent series of rebuttals to that very weird book, including some primary source evidence of its veracity.

I was so invested in this book that after the teenager and I finished it, I went on a deep-dive to learn more about Northup's life afterwards. Unfortunately, by all accounts, Northup did not cope well with his trauma upon his return to freedom. His mother had died during his incarceration, and the seven-year-old daughter he'd left greeted him as a 19-year-old woman who introduced him to the newborn son she'd named "Solomon." Northup spent time as a speaker on the abolitionist circuit, and, of course, helping author his book, and became famous enough that during the Civil War, Union soldiers who traveled through that Louisiana area sometimes sought the plantations were Northup had been held. They sent back news of this in their letters, so happily we know that Patsey, the woman who'd been repeatedly raped, and at least once beaten almost to death, by Epps, had left earlier in the war and so had at least survived long enough to achieve freedom. 

I wish we also knew what happened to the small child Emily, daughter of Eliza, who had also been held with Northup in Washington, DC. She wasn't sold onward to Louisiana but was instead retained to be forced into sex work. 

Census records tell that Northup and his wife often separated, and eventually official record loses track of him entirely. It was rumored that he suffered from alcoholism, and was likely often unhoused, as Anne Northup's obituary refers to him as a "worthless vagabond." I am so sad that this was not a happy ending!

This is a better ending: The Hollywood Reporter collected portraits of 46 of Solomon Northup's direct descendants. I LOVE this!

There are two more happy stories: that of Dr. Sue Eakin, the historian responsible for publishing a new edition of Northup's memoir and bringing his biography into prominent academic light, and that of Samuel Bass, the Canadian who successfully got actionable information to Northup's family and lawyer and was directly responsible for Northup's rescue. When my teenager and I listened to this book together, one of our favorite parts is when Bass is discussing why he'd put himself in so much danger to help Northup. He says that he wants to do this good deed so that later in life he can think about what he did and feel good about it. I mean... FAIR! 

We don't know what happened to Northup at the end of his life, but we know the entire biographies and final resting places of his enslavers (because of COURSE we do, sigh...). You can actually still visit the house that Northup was forced to help build for Edwin Epps--it's currently on the LSUA campus! I high-key love how people are using the memorial page for Epps' Find a Grave entry to roast him, and I'm definitely not NOT going to make a point of looking him up and spitting on his grave if I ever happen to be in the area, although I will probably gag myself trying and then end up barfing all over his grave because spitting is so nasty.

I guess barfing would be better anyway?

My teenager and I listened to this book together as inter-disciplinary work for her AP US History and AP English Literature and Composition studies. For a high school student, there are some excellent extension activities to add more meat and rigor for these studies, in particular. For students who need more practice writing about literature, or in using close reading as evidence for implications, I really like the reading/writing prompts at Edsitement. 

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries (where I promise I NEVER spit on graves!), handmade homeschool high school studies, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife 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.

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Homeschool AP US History: American Cake

There's a certain view of history pedagogy that feels that hands-on projects do not belong in history study. When you make a paper model of Jamestown, this view would say, you're learning not about Jamestown, but about making paper models.

In some ways, I do get where this is coming from. Lots of hands-on projects, especially for preschool/early elementary, are garbage. Like, garbage in general, as well as garbage at helping a kid explore history. Hint: anything involving a paper plate or paint chips or a brown paper lunch bag is probably garbage.

But other hands-on projects, I firmly believe, are indispensable, at least in the homeschool environment which is where all of my experience lies. And it's not so much because the craft, itself, is just that amazing--it's the context! When my kids built their paper Jamestown models, we read children's books about Jamestown and looked at images online and talked and talked and talked and talked about Jamestown together. Tiny Jamestown lived in our house for years, and we talked even more about it whenever the kids brought it out for their small-world play. When the kids created World War II propaganda posters, we read about propaganda posters and looked at images of propaganda posters online and talked and talked and talked and talked about propaganda posters together. Printed copies of their hilarious propaganda posters lived on the walls, and were subjects of family inside jokes, for years. 

So, yeah. If I just told the teenager to make a cake, a modern replica of a popular cake from the 1700s, for an AP US History enrichment project, that wouldn't be very educational. It certainly wouldn't be AP-level rigorous.

Instead, with an eye to building context, it was a family event that kept us up until midnight but built valuable historical and cross-curricular connections for the teenager. 

And it resulted in what is our new favorite family cake!

American Cake tells the history of the US, and the history of cooking, AND the history of food production, through cakes. Throughout the course of the book, you follow the evolution of ingredients like butter and eggs and milk from the organic, unpasteurized, produced-at-home product to what it is today. Same with flours, sweeteners, and all the other ingredients we commonly use in cakes. As well, you get a history lesson about the overall time period for each cake, and the specific history involved with its creation and consumption.

The cake that the teenager chose to make on this night, for instance, is the Fraunces Tavern Carrot Tea Cake. Fraunces Tavern, in New York City, is where General George Washington hosted a magnificent feast on British Evacuation Day, and this was one of the cakes on their menu at the time. It's an interesting cake because it includes cooked carrots to add sweetness in concert with the expensive white sugar, and instead of baking soda, which wasn't available then, you have to cream the crap out of the butter and sugar, whipping enough air in that it'll expand in the hot oven and make your cake rise a bit.

While the teenager made the cake, Matt and I served as her sous chefs, and we all used the time to talk about George Washington and the Revolutionary War. The teenager remembers, a little, our trip to Fort Necessity one autumn, which, along with our other side trips to Valley Forge, the Delaware River crossing site, and Mount Vernon, make a fairly decent timeline of Washington's life and career. Fort Necessity and Valley Forge are especially important to helping one remember that Washington was a nepotism baby who got his big break, a surveying job (scored without the usual required apprenticeship, because nepotism), from his brother's father-in-law, and Mount Vernon, itself, from his brother, who died young from tuberculosis.

Here's the carrot cake batter, poured into a springform pan that I did not realize we owned:

Another new-to-me appliance: a carrot peeler! I've just been using a paring knife like a jerk, but apparently the teenager has owned a carrot peeler for a decade or so, ever since that year she had a subscription to a children's cooking club that sent her a little kit every month, and this was the first time she decided to let me know about it.

I had never in my life used a carrot peeler before. It is BRILLIANT!

Because we were baking a tavern cake from the time of the Revolutionary War, it seemed appropriate to listen to Revolutionary War-era tavern music while we worked!

And then that reminded me that I should show the teenager the pro-shot Hamilton musical before our Disney+ subscription ends next week, so that's this Sunday's Family Movie Night sorted!

You won't be surprised to learn that without baking soda or baking powder, the cake didn't rise a ton, but still, it was fluffy and moist, even though the teenager and I cut it open piping hot from the oven at the stroke of midnight. We were pretty sure we'd ruin it by doing so, but we could NOT wait until morning to try it, so we cut ourselves fresh pieces, I slathered mine with clotted cream, and we had ourselves a little midnight party.

By the next morning, there was just three-quarters of the cake left, and by that night, all that was left was this:

This cake? Was DELICIOUS! I already love carrot cake, and this is a less-sweet version. It's carrot cake that doesn't give you a headache ten minutes later! Carrot cake, but when you eat it you can actually taste more than just sugar!

Fraunces actually became Washington's steward during his presidency, so it feels safe to assume that his tavern's special cake was probably on the menu at least occasionally. I'm sure the sugar didn't help the terrible state of his teeth, but cake IS pretty soft...

Two Days in Cincinnati with My Girl Scout Troop: On the Second Day, We Got Some Education and Ate Ourselves Silly

The previous evening, all my Girl Scouts were still going strong when I was beyond ready for bed. I left them to their own activities of working on photo embellishment crafts for their Ambassador Photographer badge, playing card games (Professor Noggin is still a hit even with these big kids!), eating snacks, watching TV, and just generally having a lovely time together, but I asked that before they, too, headed up to bed, they load and start the dishwasher.

I woke up on this morning long before any teenagers, so I tumbled out of bed and stumbled to the kitchen to pour myself a cup of cold-brew coffee from the refrigerator, and I found that the kitchen? Was PRISTINE! Not only had the kids loaded and started the dishwasher, as requested, so that all the dishes were sparkling clean and ready for breakfast, but they'd also tidied up and organized our kitchen island full of snacks, and spray cleaned the stovetop and all the counters, The space looked as nice as it had when we'd checked in!

I LOVE traveling with teenagers!

The oven was still not working, so the camping-style breakfast sandwiches we'd envisioned, with all the different ingredients baked on sheet pans, then sandwiched inside English muffins, wrapped in foil, and warmed up back in the oven, were a bust, alas. But at least breakfast sandwiches, unlike the previous night's pizzas and cookies, are amenable to being cooked on the stovetop. After my first cup of coffee, I prepped leftover meats and veggies and cheeses that kids might like to mix into omelets or scrambles, then whenever a teenager appeared, I directed her away from my jug of cold-brew coffee and towards her own homemade breakfast prep.

If a kid told me she'd never cooked her own egg before, I just handed her off to another kid who had. Stretch those leadership skills, Girl Scouts!

We had a REALLY full day of sightseeing ahead of us, so as soon as we'd all finished breakfast, we packed up and headed back out into the city. I 100% had a panic attack about the lack of parking in downtown Cincinnati, and at one point, as I drove in circles around the city streets, pretty sure that our entire lives would just be circling these same five blocks until we died, a Girl Scout in the passenger seat literally held my phone up so my co-leader driving the other car could coo reassurances at me via speakerphone, so hallelujah that eventually an extremely kind parking attendant of a completely full parking garage directed us to another garage that had space for us.

It turns out that Pink was playing a concert in the downtown baseball stadium that night, and everyone in the world was planning to be there!

But first, a museum!

The Ohio River was a very important crossing for the Underground Railroad, and there are numerous important Underground Railroad sites in both Ohio and Indiana, so we planned to spend the morning at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center to educate ourselves on these topics of local and national history.

The museum was VERY interesting, and I think we all learned a ton, but sensitive content warning: the exhibit on contemporary human trafficking is going to be way too dark for a lot of younger kids. 

There were also art and fashion exhibits--

Look who has now graduated to Troop Helper!

--and the incredible exhibits on the Underground Railroad.

Y'all. This is a literal 1800s slave pen:

One day, out of nowhere, a nearby property owner on the Kentucky side of the river called up the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center and claimed that on their property was an old tobacco barn that local legend said had once been used as a slave pen. Would the museum be interested in it?

Through archival research and physical evidence, the museum was able to verify that this building was, indeed, an actual slave pen. They had it carefully removed from the site, then carefully rebuilt, exactly as it had been, inside the museum. 

It's so sad, and so powerful, and such a testament to the importance of knowing your local history. Neighbors transmitted this story of the building's former life from generation to generation, orally, from the early 1800s to today. People passed the story on to the current property owner, who had no historical connection to the property and no way of otherwise knowing its history. And that property owner, instead of discounting the story or just ignoring it, recognized its importance and reached out to the museum. It wasn't too tough to verify, but without that word of mouth, and that property owner's initiative, that slave pen would be rotting anonymously in its field today, because historians don't just roam the back roads, looking for important things that have been forgotten, and they don't just troll the newspaper archives, looking for places that might still be there. It's our job to preserve our own local histories, to pass down stories to the next generations, and to research our own properties and families to see if there's something important to discover.

At least, that's what the docent said to me when I mentioned that I've got kind of a weird old building on my property, too. I was all, "Oh, but it's not important like THIS building!", and she was all, "Well, why don't you get your butt down to your county archives and make sure." So I guess I have a weekend project this autumn!

You can see more about the slave pen here.

I also thought that the exhibit on other local sites important to the movement of enslaved people was interesting. The photo below says that it's a buffalo trace, but I think it looks like a holloway!

Eventually, six hungry Girl Scouts and two hungry adult chaperones left the museum and walked a couple of blocks over to our meeting point for our food tour!

I was VERY excited that the kids picked this activity! I'd never done anything like it, and it was so fun! It was part walking tour, in which we'd follow our guide while she told us about the history of Cincinnati and its local food scenes, and part tasting experience, as we dipped into several restaurants and shops and markets and ate a sampling of their offerings. 

bangers and mash at Nicholson's Pub

Tyler Davidson fountain: it's an actual water fountain, too, and has a spigot you can drink from!

This is the hotel where Pink was, and there's the car waiting to take her to the stadium.

The tour ended with Belgian waffles at Findlay Market. Funny that a year ago, I'd never been to a downtown market like this, and now I've been to two different ones in Ohio and two different ones in London!

We practiced our food photography during the tour. Those Ambassador Photographer badges aren't going to earn themselves!

The kids enjoyed browsing around the market, and a few bought delicious souvenirs. My troop helper "forgot her credit card," and yet still ended up with some fudge somehow, ahem. College students are supposed to be spoiled when they're back home with you!

Not gonna lie: I was too full after that food tour, and the overwarm, overcrowded streetcar back downtown did NOT help, blurg. Time to all get some fresh air and some beautiful photos of the river by walking the Roebling Suspension Bridge!

As a bonus, at the time there was actually a Roebling Suspension Bridge photo contest underway, which I encouraged all my Girl Scouts to enter... and one of them WON!!!

And then somehow the kids were all hungry AGAIN, so we walked to Graeter's and bought them all ice cream before finally heading back to our cars that were safely and miraculously parked in the middle of the downtown chaos.

I was so tired that I blasted my Favorites playlist the whole way home and sang along loudly to every single song to keep myself revved up, and the kids in my car were so tired that not one of them uttered so much as a peep in protest. You're welcome for the two-hour concert, Girl Scouts!

Postscript: I wrote a three-star review of our Airbnb, mentioning the oven problem and the host's lack of communication. The next day, the host hit me with a Resolution Center Reimbursement Request for over a hundred dollars, claiming that we'd stolen a USB port and broken the dishwasher door. When Airbnb asked me if I wanted to file a rebuttal, I wrote them a 29-page Google Doc that used photographic evidence both from our stay and the Airbnb's listing to prove that the host was lying, and documented a pattern I'd uncovered in which whenever a guest posted a negative review of their stay, this host would write a public response that said they were going to file a Resolution Center Reimbursement Request against them. 

Airbnb decided the issue in my favor. 

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, handmade homeschool high school studies, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!