Spring Bookfest

We interrupted our Chocolate Unit for our Spring Bookfest, with special guests Heidi and Meg. Everyone had previously prepared a report or project on a book of their choice, and at the Bookfest we presented our projects to each other and had a nice lunch. We held the festivities outside in the backyard, using the playhouse porch as our stage. It was really fun!

For her project, Daisy made a matching tiny book to go with her favorite penguin book. I helped her take pictures of every page, print them out at a tiny size, and then she cut out all the page spreads and I helped fasten them together. She LOVES her tiny book!

She was cute doing her oral presentation, if a little giggle-y. :)

Abraham told us about an Encyclopedia Brown mystery involving an egg-spinning contest. He re-created the contest, told us the facts, and let the audience see if they could solve the mystery. It was really good.

Heidi talked about Sid Fleischman and some of the events in his life that inspired his books. I was particularly interested to learn that he wrote a biography of Mark Twain (I have only read his fiction). Abraham liked learning some details about Fleishman's background as a traveling magician, and we liked the reminder that when we write and re-write and revise again and again, "all that's wasted is the paper!"

I thought for sure I had taken a picture of Meg's presentation, but I can't find it! Cute Meg talked about The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie and taught us what she had learned in that book about philately (a new word she taught us, which means studying stamps and postal history). We learned about the 3 elements of a stamp (value, design, country of origin) and then Meg helped everyone make and decorate their own postage stamps! It was such fun!

Malachi gave his presentation on The Stokes Guide to Western Birds. He drew pictures of the baby, juvenile, and adult plumage for all his favorite birds (robins, bald eagles, yellow warblers, painted buntings, and flamingos) and told a little bit about each kind of bird. It was very informative! The little girls helped him by holding up the pictures.

Sebastian's presentation was on the DK Eyewitness book Electronics. He made a poster showing and explaining the different parts of a circuit board. He had a real circuit board which we could touch and look at, and then he explained how each component worked, and what its symbol would be on a circuit diagram. I learned a lot from this presentation!

Our Spring Bookfest was a rousing success and we hope to make this an annual (or semi-annual!) event. It was a fun day!

Chocolate Exhibit at UMNH

This was a fun exhibit to see at the Natural History Museum. We especially liked the model of a cacao tree at the entrance.

We attended a tasting session at the exhibit, which was okay---there were only a few types of chocolate to taste, though, and we didn't love any of them. We also felt like the information presented could have been more in-depth (but then, we'd been learning about chocolate for a couple weeks already, so we had already heard all the basics). But it was fun to get to see and handle real cacao pods and cacao beans.

This was a cute little place to pose on chocolate footstools. Goldie was so cute and happy to be (momentarily) out of her stroller! :)

Maya and Aztec Hot Chocolate

We learned that the Ancient Maya and the Aztecs used cacao to make a bitter drink called cacahuatl or kakaw. They ground up the beans, mixed them with water and chiles (and sometimes maize), and used them to make a drink that was "food of the Gods." That's where we get the Latin name of the cacao bean, Theobroma Cacao. The Maya believed that the god Quetzalcoatl himself brought down the cacao tree from heaven and showed their ancestors how to make chocolate. (If you believe the Maya are in some way the descendants of the Nephites and Lamanites, and Quetzalcoatl is a legend based on the appearance of Jesus Christ, does this mean Jesus is the one who first taught mankind about chocolate? Discuss. :))

Here is a video (in two parts) of the history of chocolate, from an indigenous peoples' perspective.

We liked these illustrations about chocolate's history (especially the one about trading cacao beans for bunnies!)

To see sort of how cacahuatl would have tasted, we made this Crio Bru drink, which is made from roasted and ground cacao beans. The websites says you just prepare it like coffee, but since I've never made coffee that wasn't helpful at all. I have made herbal tea, though, and after some research I realized it's the same idea---letting the flavoring agent steep in hot water until it imparts its flavor to the water. 

You could use a tea infuser to hold the ground beans, but since we were making a larger pot full, I just boiled the ground beans right in the water, and then strained them out to leave only the cacao-flavored liquid behind.

Without the chiles this wasn't completely authentic, but we didn't add sugar or milk or anything, so it did give us some idea of the taste of the ancient drink.

You can see that some of the cacao butter within the beans has separated out from the water and is floating on top, making kind of an oily film. On another day, we talked more about emulsification and why this happens, but this would have been characteristic of hot drinking chocolate even later than Maya and Aztec times---even when the drink was exported to Spain and other parts of Europe and sweetened with sugar. They didn't figure out how to make hot chocolate smooth and velvety like it is today until Joseph Fry invented the process of making solid bar chocolate in the 1840s.

None of us really liked the Crio Bru. You can sweeten it with sugar and milk, but even when we tried that we just thought it was weird. Maybe if I had known what I was doing when preparing it (or had a "French press," whatever that is) it would have been better. Or maybe we just don't have the taste for coffee-like drinks. But anyway, it was interesting to try.

Next, we made a spicy, Maya-style hot chocolate that was a little more to our tastes because it had sugar and milk added as well. But we wanted to prepare it the special ancient way, which means building up a froth by pouring the chocolate over and over from a great height, as seen in these ancient pictures:

Looks fun, doesn't it?

It was! We started out low and got higher and higher as we got more daring (I would recommend putting towels down on the floor though, just in case!) :)

The cocoa did, indeed, get very frothy and foamy. Yum!

We used this recipe here, but used chile powder and cut the amount to less than 1/4 tsp. It was still really spicy for us! But thick, dark, and good. We loved the cinnamon flavor.

Maya and Aztec calendar craft

We spent some time talking about the Olmec, the Aztec, and the Maya, as they were the first civilizations to cultivate cacao and use it for drinking. Sam had a great class in college about the Maya, and he knows a lot about them, so we will have to revisit this subject another time so we can do more justice to that great civilization. This time, we just read a few books and learned some interesting facts about the Aztec and the Maya.

Here's a short video about some of the technology of the Aztecs

One thing we learned was about the Aztec calendar system (which came from the Maya) and we made calendars that showed how that worked: there was a regular calendar and a religious calendar, and the intersection of the two determined when various holy days fell in the year. (You can read general instructions here. We put our two calendar wheels side by side instead of one within the other.) We copied the glyphs out of one of our books, but you can find some here as well.

We also made "embossed" medallions like the Aztecs did, by drawing with blunt pencils on aluminum foil and then folding the foil onto cardboard circles. You can punch a hole, add a ribbon, and actually hang these around your neck, but we didn't.

I thought it was really funny how one of our books mentioned all these long, difficult Aztec names like Cuauhtémoc and Tenochtitlán (I would have never been able to pronounce them without Sam's help!)...

But then the glossary didn't even give a pronunciation guide for those words, instead helpfully showing us words like claim (KLAYM) and explore (ek-SPLOR). Thanks a lot!

We also made coiled clay pots like the Aztecs did. Seb thought his looked like a CFL bulb,

So he made it into a CFL bulb.

Then he made an incandescent bulb and had a bright idea! Silly, silly.

Cacao Trees and Cacao Beans

We spent a day just studying the cacao tree, which is pretty fascinating. This picture is from a model at the Chocolate Exhibit we went to---you can see how huge the cacao pods are, and then the flowers are those tiny little pink and white things you can see coming out of the trunk. The tree has flowers, buds, unripe pods, and pods on it, all at the same time and all year round. And the pods themselves are too thick to just break open when they fall, so the seeds must be spread by animals (and people) breaking open the pods, which, historically, they did in order to get at the sweet white pulp inside.

I had the children make lift-the-flap pictures of cacao trees and cacao pods, to show what is inside the pods. You can't see it in this picture, but the inside of a cacao pod looks like this, if you're curious.

(image credit)

You can see the white pulp and what almost look like corn kernels inside the pod---the cacao beans are within that pulp. They are kind of a pale tan color at first, but get darker and browner as they ferment and dry.

We also learned about the three types of cacao beans: forastero, criollo, and trinitario.

Here are some resources for learning about cacao trees and cacao beans:

How cacao beans are harvested (starts around 10:38)

How the cacao tree grows (from Kew Gardens in England---I've been there, but I don't recall seeing cacao trees! I wish I had.)

Another video about How cacao grows, this one by the Eden Project 

Shows a guy opening a cacao pod, eating some of the pulp, smacking his lips, etc. :)

This is a fun interactive animation from the Field Museum. You can look at some of the conditions needed for growing cacao, and some of the insects and animals that help support its ecosystem.

We also tasted raw cacao beans--very bitter, but still interesting. You can buy these raw cocoa nibs (the nib is just the inside of the cacao bean, after the shell has been removed) but we had some of these raw beans which you can brew up (like coffee?) and make a drink. We tasted that drink on another day---about which more later---but on this day we just tried some of the ground-up beans to see what they tasted like. 

Rainforest Model

We started this Chocolate Unit by studying the tropical rainforest, which is where wild cacao trees are found. We learned about the different layers of the rainforest, epiphytes and bromeliads, animal life and plant life that lives in each layer, etc. We made this model (inspired by this picture here) of the four rainforest layers, using cardboard boxes for the layers, twisted packing paper and toilet-paper tubes for tree trunks, branches from our fake silk trees for branches (we'll put them back afterwards, and some were broken already), easter grass for vines, and our little toy animals.

There are lots of flying things up in the emergent layer

In the understory (growing up from the forest floor), we have our cacao tree---you can see the football-shaped pods (almonds colored red) growing all over the trunk and branches. Cacao pods really grow like that (as opposed to from the ends of branches, like most fruit)---a phenomenon called "cauliflory."

We also tasted this delicious drink (you can order a free sample here!) made from the pulp of the cacao pod. It doesn't taste like chocolate at all---it's sweet and fruity. This is what the birds and animals are trying to get to when they break open cacao pods, NOT the bitter cacao beans (seeds)! They eat the sweet white pulp and spit out the beans, which, as they fall on the forest floor, grow up into new cacao trees.

And, since we were going to be visiting the Redwoods shortly after this unit, we also talked about the temperate rainforest, which doesn't have cacao trees in it but is very interesting all the same! :) I didn't know before this that the redwood forests were actually considered rainforests.

The only trouble with this model is that it's kind of precarious and Goldie always crawls into it and tries to eat the almonds. (The bunny hops over and eats the almonds too, sometimes.) But the children are so proud of it they won't let me take it apart.

Chocolate Unit Schedule and Lesson Plan

I'd been wanting to do a unit on chocolate for awhile, and when I saw the Natural History Museum had a special exhibit on chocolate going on, it seemed like a good enough reason to do it now! There were lots of ideas online, my favorite being Montserrat (of Cranial Hiccups)'s Chocolate Unit Study. The Field Museum also has some really good resources.

Here are some more curriculum materials about chocolate---quite in-depth

Some cool sculptures made of chocolate

Do you wonder when to use "cacao" and when to use "cocoa"? I did. Cocoa is really just a European misspelling of cacao, but the convention now is to use "cacao" when referring to the tree and the beans, and "cocoa" once the manufacturing process has started. Thus, "cacao beans," and "cocoa butter." So now you know!

And here is my Chocolate Unit Pinterest Board