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!

Homeschool Art History: Frida Kahlo and Political Art

 

Art history isn't something that has its own curriculum on the kids' homeschool high school transcripts. Instead, at least so far, it's something that we've done as unit studies, and then I've incorporated those studies into whatever syllabus best fits it. For Will, all of her high school art studies, both hands-on and history/appreciation activities, are included as a 1-credit Fine Arts class on her transcript, and the syllabus includes details of each activity and resources used, written after the fact based on what was actually accomplished.

Syd will have numerous Fine Arts classes on her high school transcript, and it's my hope that one of them will, indeed, be Art History, although for that to be a credit that stands on its own we'll have to conduct a more thorough, extensive study at some point.

Until then, we study the art that interests the kids, as it catches their interest. And recently, that was Frida Kahlo, inspired by the Mexico study that was, itself, inspired by our Girl Scout troop's Spring Break cruise.

As we often do when we start a completely new unit of study, we started our Frida Kahlo unit with a selection of picture books. You know that expression--"Explain it to me like I'm five?" Picture books are meant to offer digestible explanations in an appealing manner, often exploring a topic through a unique lens meant to engage and inspire.

Both of these books were excellent introductions to the basics of Kahlo's life and works:

• Portrait of an Artist: Frida Kahlo
• Frida Kahlo and the Bravest Girl in the World

I've been trying to relearn some of my Spanish this year, so the kids also let me read to them from this awesome book:

• Frida Kahlo y Sus Animalitos

So many animal names to look up and learn! Clearly, my college Spanish classes focused on the wrong things...

Part of the work for this study was creating activities to teach younger Girl Scouts about Frida Kahlo for our Girl Scout troop's World Thinking Day kit, so the kids chose their favorite Frida Kahlo paintings, and I used Google Image searches to find and download high-quality jpegs of them and printed them two to a page on cardstock. I try to remember to do this with all the images we study, whether they're paintings, photos, sculpture, or whatever. They come in endlessly handy for comparison and review, they make your Timeline game even bigger and better, and it's awesome how often they come in handy to build context in a different study. 

And because every good Girl Scout activity includes a craft, the kids of COURSE had to test out these Frida Kahlo paper dolls:

Beyond the picture books and paper dolls, the kids and I LOVED this American Experience documentary on Frida Kahlo:

It's a surprisingly exciting ride, with shocking moments, plot twists, stunning revelations, and a strong female lead! And it answers the question of Was Frida Kahlo The Most Epic Person To Ever Have Lived? with a resounding...

OMG yes. Hard yes. All. The. Yes.

Once we were all devoted Frida Kahlo fangirls, I wanted the kids to have some practice analyzing her art. We'd also been talking separately about different methods of political protest, from flipping off the people who harass visitors to our local Planned Parenthood to participating in a march to support abortion rights, etc., so it seemed like a good chance to use Frida Kahlo as an example of how gender affects political speech, the kinds of political issues relevant to gender issues, and how personal speech can conflate with political speech to empower both.

We did a similar study of political speech in racial justice a couple of years ago, so this unit also builds upon that one.

For this study, we focused more overtly on the definition of political art, and examples of the main types of political art:

I borrowed heavily from the PBS LearningMedia lesson on The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo for this, including borrowing the second page of this student handout for the kids to use to organize their work. 

For their culminating project in this study, I assigned the kids each a selection of Kahlo pieces, and other pieces like Shepard Fairey's Obama graphic, Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, a mural that's locally infamous for including a KKK cross burning, and that lost Diego Rivera mural, and asked the kids to thoughtfully categorize each piece as personal or a specific type of political, justifying their conclusions with evidence. I wouldn't necessarily say that I agreed with all of their categorizations, but they did back up their claims with evidence!

If we'd wanted to carry this study further, the kids could have used that worksheet as the basis for any number of essays, or they could have created their own personal-as-political self portraits or political art of any category. We might do some political art, anyway, as the kids have expressed interest in coming with me to the next Bans Off Our Bodies Block Party, and obviously they can't go without excellent protest signs!

I was happy, though, for the kids to simply accomplish my main learning objectives for them: 1) to fall in love with Frida Kahlo, and 2) to widen their understanding of how we, particularly as women, can express ourselves politically in this patriarchal culture. 

Ooh, how awesome would a Frida Kahlo-themed protest sign be?!? 

Mapping the Yucatan Peninsula

 

I don't even know how I would homeschool without a giant homemade map, y'all. We've been downloading, printing, and taping together these huge Megamaps since Syd was two and Will was three, and now here we are with Syd at fifteen and Will at seventeen, and we're still making and marking up giant maps.

I originally printed and compiled this map of Mexico, and a separate one of North America, for my Girl Scout troop to use during our troop trip planning meetings. It was VERY amusing to unleash a troop of teenagers with a pack of markers onto a map of North America and tell them to label everything they know. Some kids eagerly took marker in hand with a gleam in the eye, and some kids hesitantly took marker in hand with a look that was more like, "Oh, shit...", but everybody was able to label something, and all efforts were praised.

They were ALL hesitant when I then presented them with this map of Mexico and the same instructions, but they gamely went to work and were eventually persuaded that they all knew a little more than they thought they did. We did have a useful conversation, though, about why it is that we don't seem to know very much about the geography of Mexico, seeing as it's just right there below us. 

If you look closely, you can see that placing Mexico City took them a couple of tries...

The troop basically helped my own kiddos get a head start on what is now their map for our Mesoamerica unit study. We're studying the history, geography, geology, environment, and culture of Mesoamerica, with an emphasis on the Maya since theirs is the specific region we'll be visiting on our Girl Scout troop trip to Mexico.

But until we get to go there and look at it all in person, we have to rely on maps! This book is turning out to be the spine of our study so far:

• The Maya

--and on this particular day, the kids transferred much of the information from Chapter 1 onto our map. 

Will was in charge of finding images of the animals that were important to the Ancient Maya, then gluing them to the margin of the map and labeling them: 

She and I also got out the compass so we could draw and label the Chicxulub Crater:

You guys, on our upcoming Girl scout troop trip, our cruise ship will be going RIGHT OVER the crater! And the cenotes that Will and I are going to snorkel in are directly related to that impact!

Fun fact: I am both pretty sure that snorkeling in a cenote is how I die, and also definitely going to go snorkel in a cenote. Life is complicated, y'all. 

Syd was in charge of the task of drawing the main rivers of Mesoamerica:

Fortunately, Jones was there to lend his assistance:

On a previous day, the kids had used the list of important places from this book--

• Maya: Amazing Inventions You Can Build Yourself

--to map and collect images of Ancient Maya sites (I even made them write a paragraph about each site and turned them into adorable flash cards. They're so cute and I love them and the kids are absolutely horrified because they think they're too old for flash cards, my silly little geese), so those are the other little icons you can see on the map:

 

A lot of the map's real estate is wasted at the moment, since we're only studying Mesoamerica and not the rest of Mexico, but now that the kids are old enough to use a large-format map without utterly demolishing it in the process, I think I can hang onto this map even when we're finished and keep it for a future Syd study, at least.

Whirlwind Trip to NYC Day 2: The American Museum of Natural History to Times Square

I tried really hard to confine myself to only one museum on this whirlwind trip. Mind you, I could spend every day of the rest of my life in a different museum and be as happy as a Mercenaria mercenaria, but I'm supposed to be practicing moderation in all things, sigh, so I picked only one museum--the very, very large American Museum of Natural History--and planned to spend only one day--a very, very, VERY long day!--there.

I also managed to pick the very stupidest way to get there, because just because Google Maps includes subway routes doesn't mean they have to make sense, and I managed to turn the exact wrong way upon leaving the subway station, which is my absolute biggest pet peeve, grrr. But finally, passing three playgrounds and a farmer's market and two different Covid testing/vaccination stations, we made it!

Or rather, we made it into the line that extended from the entrance, down the stairs, around a corner, and past the building. And that WAS the line for our reserved tickets! We provided plenty of entertainment for the passersby who felt pretty happily smug that THEY weren't the ones in such a long line, and one guy smirkingly informed us as he passed that we'd still be in line at 4:00 pm, but joke's on him, because it took exactly 41 minutes until it was our turn to show our vaccination cards (the NYC Covid Safe app is the best thing EVER!) and tickets and get sent into natural history heaven.

I don't so much love the hands-on science museums that I've spent the kids' entire lives shuttling them to and from, it seems, but give me an old-school set of exhibits like the Hall of African Mammals and I. Am. SET! 

And OMG they have dinosaurs!

You guys, that's a Barnum Brown Tyrannosaurus rex! Here's me being... not real chill about the first complete T. rex skull, also collected by Brown:

Here's the beautiful Allosaurus:

And the Apatosaurus!

It's walking on an excavation of the Glen Rose Trackway. When I was an undergrad way back forever ago, my university was in driving distance of several fascinating fossil sites, and I'd often make a day trip to hang out in the Glen Rose Formation instead of writing my English Lit essays.

I would have told you back then that I had zero interest in science, too! Self-knowledge has never been part of my skill set...

Syd and I hadn't eaten breakfast, so she and I took a break after this to brave the crowded cafeteria while Will and Matt visited another hall. As soon as we sat down, though, I texted Matt that there were free refills on the fountain drinks, and we'd bought a cup(!!!), and mysteriously, even though they hadn't been at all hungry or thirsty when we separated, they both showed up in minutes and helped us do our part to get our money's worth on our five-dollar drink cup.

Ahem.

So, I did have one ulterior motive for visiting the American Museum of Natural History as opposed to, say, the MOMA. The kids and I are studying Meso-American history, geography, and culture this year, and the AMNH has an excellent Hall of Mexico and Central America. 

This is a votive adze, a ceremonial piece made of jade and probably of Olmec creation. Fun fact: the Olmec produced a LOT of art depicting were-jaguars, and this is likely one of them!

This mask is currently the only known Olmec object made of wood. You can see bits of a jade mosaic that was added to it in some post-Olmec time:

At almost six feet, this is a life-size plaster replica of an Olmec monument that's thought to be the portrait of a leader. You'll be pleased to know that the original is home in Xalapa, Veracruz:

This is an Aztec sculpture. This type of figure, with that one hand raised, has also been found in several other Aztec sites:

This is a clay funeral urn from Oaxaca, probably from around 200-550 AD. It was collected in 1904, and on the AMNH database you can see the original manuscript catalog for this and the other items in this hall. They're fascinating, because they're all handwritten (and why would you not use your most legible handwriting when writing a museum catalog?!?), and they make clear that provenance around this time was pretty fast and loose. One entry I looked at described some artifacts that came buried in a box full of dirt along with a skull! 

Here's another clay urn from the same site. When I was looking this one up in the AMNH database, I found a more updated catalog that described it as a product of the 1901 Loubat Expedition. I'm low-key interested in historic archeological expeditions (mainly because of how Wild West, unethical, and off-the-rails they could be), so I did some additional digging for info, and found a dissertation about the conflict between Mexican and American representation during these historic expeditions. 

Basically, for the Loubat Expedition, the AMNH made a contract with the government of Mexico, stating where they'd go and what they'd look for, etc. The AMNH had a guy, Marshall Seville, and the Mexican government had a guy, Leopoldo Batres. They were meant to work together in relative harmony, but Seville spends most of his written reports back to the AMNH bitching about Batres, and Batres spends most of his reports back to the Mexican government talking about all the cool stuff he was doing and, oh yeah, Seville was also present, I guess.

Here's a model of an Aztec stone depicting the date when the Aztecs won a bunch of really cool wars against likely unsuspecting outlying nations. We were sitting on a bench across from this stone, resting our feet, when a family walked by that contained my least-favorite travel persona: Man Who Loudly Explains Things. Man Who Loudly Explains Things proceeded to explain to his family about the Aztec calendar that predicts the end of the world (I gritted my teeth) and the Aztec ball game in which they sacrificed the losers to their gods (I gasped, whirled around to my own family, and exclaimed "That's not true!" while they reminded me that I'm supposed to shush in public). 

I mean, yes, people probably got sacrificed sometimes, but 1) we don't know nearly enough about these ancient nations to say with any kind of certainty what they did or didn't do, especially about something as emotionally charged as human sacrifice (I blame you entirely for this, Diego de Landa!), and 2) OBVIOUSLY they didn't always sacrifice the losers of this game, because it's a really difficult game! If you always sacrificed the losers, all the players would suck at it and you'd probably run out of them after too long, too.

Here's a replica of a 700s Maya Stela that's also thankfully still where it's supposed to be in Mexico.

This is a limestone slab from Guatemala circa 633. Check out that beautiful writing!

A lot of figurines like this one were found in graves on the Island of Jaina in Tabasco. They range from about 600-900 AD.

This is another clay Maya sculpture

The provenance for these little bowls is unclear, other than that they're circa 600-900 AD from Mexico. That little guy is emerging from a shell, though, which says something interesting to me about the Maya's relationship to the ocean.

Here's another figure from the same area with an uncertain provenance, although they think it's probably from Guatemala:

And here are some painted vases from the same period. Reading between the lines in the manuscript catalog, I get the idea that much of the early 1900s consisted of rich people donating artifacts of uncertain provenance, probably looted, bought on the black market, or otherwise illegally put into their possession. The AMNH said thanks, wrote down the little info about them that the donors could give, and popped them into their collections.

At one point I left the family so I could go find a bathroom (SO many refills of fountain lemonade!!!), and when Matt texted me much later to find out who'd abducted me and what they wanted for ransom, I was all, "Oh, right... I sort of ended up in the Hall of Meteorites instead?"

Side note: I'm going to pretend to the kids that the Chicxulub Crater is an important part of our Meso-America study because when we take our Girl Scout troop trip to Mexico, our ship will be sailing right over it!!!!! When we do, you'll find me standing on the deck screaming "SQUEE!!!!!"

This is the very, very, very beautiful Esquel meteorite, found in Argentina.

Eventually, I met up with everyone else in the Halls of Gems and Minerals. The kids really liked this exhibit, so we're going to do more with it this semester as part of Syd's geology study.

This is a 9-foot amethyst geode. It definitely beats out the quartz geodes that the kids and I collect while creek stomping!

This is an 838-pound stibnite, formed with spacious perfection in an underground cavern:

This is elbaite tourmaline from Brazil.

The afternoon is very much wearing away at this point, and here Will kind of lost her head a little. I had mentioned numerous times throughout the day that the AMNH is too big to see in one day, but it's not going anywhere, so we'll see what we can see in one day and then we'll come back another day to see some more. I encouraged Will to choose specific halls to visit, and for most of the day, she happily wandered from exhibit to exhibit, happy as a clam looking at every single display and reading every single word on every single label.

But her list of what she wanted to see kept growing longer, and the day kept growing shorter. The last two hours of our time in the museum mostly consisted of Will bolting frantically from one hall to another across the entire freaking museum from it to another equidistant from the first two, and also up three flights of stairs. Not gonna lie--Syd and I tapped out for a while and people watched on this here bench:

And then we tapped out some more and hit the gift shop. Somebody please buy me all these dino plushies please!

But then Will rushed past us muttering something about a life-sized model of a blue whale, and I was back on my feet.

Origami Christmas tree on the way there!

And, indeed, a life-size model of a blue whale! You can barely see Syd and Matt lying flat on their backs underneath it.

And then, since I was up again, we might as well go to a couple more dinosaur halls!

Mosasaur!!!!!

Found a random, beautiful view of Manhattan at sunset!

This beautiful mummy is my very favorite dinosaur, Edmontosaurus annectens! I own so many of your fossilized tendons, sweet Edmontosaurus!

Eventually, not even halfway through Will's list of THINGS SHE ABSOLUTELY MUST SEE OR SHE'LL SIMPLY DIE, the AMNH had the nerve to close!

Oh, well. Let's go see if Times Square is tacky!

Yep, it's tacky, all right! And now we can say we know that first-hand!

Okay, I am so disappointed that I don't think I can even talk about this, and I kind of want to vomit right now just thinking about it because emotions are tough, but before we went back to our AirBnb and ordered take-out pizza, we walked over to see how to get to Hadestown the next day.

Turns out we really will have to take the long way 'round to get there. Another time!

I continually reminded the kids to make memories of the cool NYC stuff that we were already getting used to, so here's your ubiquitous subway shot:

And here's Sylvia's, the super famous soul food restaurant across the street from our AirBnb!

I loved our AirBnb. LOVED it. However, I did not love it on this night, because it turns out that the seafood restaurant below us was having some kind of... rave, maybe? On a Sunday night? All I know is it was so loud that it vibrated the drinks in our glasses, and we had to shout to talk to each other, and it did not end until after 1:30, because it was still going when I finally fell asleep, the bed shaking to the rhythm of the DJ's sick beats.