Chocolate!

We are studying Chocolate! Why? It started because of 3 things: 

We were studying countries in Africa (with LiftEd) and one thing we learned is that almost half of the world's chocolate comes from African countries. (Africa Month 8) We have also been talking about how slavery and child labor has a history with chocolate, including today (Slavery Month 8).  These are sobering topics to discuss.  They affect today's children so it matters to us!

We are starting to look at some countries in South America (Latin America Month 9) right now as well.  Since cacao beans grow along the equator, we have been learning about the Mayans and about their chocolate experience and how the Spanish encountered chocolate (Spanish Main Month 2 -which is where we should be on the rotation schedule, but we are loving wandering around right now!) 

We are still working through our Botany Study that we started over the summer.  Cacao trees are so cool and have been a neat plant to add into our study! (We are using this science unit in a very WEH way so that it suits our Family Academy learning style.)

And also, its almost Halloween so there are treats on everyone's mind.  What better time to learn about one of our favorite treats? We are also studying the human body (Human Body Month 9) because this time of year there are skeletons everywhere. We will look into digestion of chocolate too!

I'm sharing some of our resources for our study. These resources we found on YouTube:

We started with the picture book: Chocolate Tree A Mayan Folk Tale 

Amazon link

Then watched a short TedEd video about the history of chocolate.  This talks about some of the slavery issues with cacao harvest.

Time Lapse of a Cacao Tree is so cool from seed to plant!

Next we watched a video that shows from harvest to chocolate what the process looks like.

This harvest video of cacao is so beautiful.

We enjoyed watching how Swiss Chocolate is made.  This inspired us to try to make our own chocolate!

M read Charlie and the Chocolate factory and we tried to take a field trip to a chocolate factory.  It didn't work out so we will try again!

We had an epic chocolate poetry tea time with chocolate tasting from 40%-100% cacao. And Hot chocolate to drink, of course!