Lesson Plans for Hands-on

Lesson Plans for Hands-On

Making and Knowing Lesson Plans and associated teaching resources provide step-by-step guidance in planning and executing hands-on activities in the classroom, studio, laboratory, maker space, or kitchen. These Lesson Plans could be integrated into classes for skill building, as one-off sessions for group community building, or to stimulate students’ historical imagination by exposure to past materials and processes. The hands-on activities offered here can also be used as stand-alone activities for public outreach.

Tips for Hands-On Teaching

Tips for Hands-on Teaching and Learning, compiled from Making and Knowing Project experience.

Lesson Plans, Assignments, and Hands-On Activity Sheets

The lesson plans below are listed in order, starting out with activities that involve familiar and accessible materials and processes (e.g., foods and cooking), and progressing to somewhat more complex and potentially unfamiliar hands-on work (varnish, mold-making). Each lesson plan offers:

  • learning objectives
  • detailed instructions about materials and process for instructors
  • informational resources (explanatory presentations as pdfs; class reading suggestions) that can form the core of instructor lectures or of preparatory student reading, watching, discussion, and reflection
  • safety considerations, if applicable
  • downloadable, adaptable student assignments (“activity sheets”) as linked documents.
  • resources for the lesson from Secrets of Craft and Nature and Ms. Fr. 640.
  • Tip: skip to the end of the lesson plan for a list of all linked resources in the lesson.

Hunting for Secrets in Secrets of Craft and Nature

A great way to get started in a class or workshop by familiarizing students with the digital critical edition of Ms. Fr. 640 and the manuscript itself through a scavenger hunt of its contents.

Historical Culinary Recipe Reconstruction

Reconstructing an obscure culinary recipe is especially effective as a first hands-on activity to familiarize students with the textual and material challenges of following historical recipes. It is also a wonderful community-building exercise. The students work in groups at home for a week intepreting the recipe, searching for and obtaining ingredients, trying their recipe as many times as possible, and making a powerpoint presentation about their process and questions. Culinary results can be brought into class when completed for group digestion and discussion.

Bread Making, Molding, and Casting

An intriguing recipe in Ms. Fr. 640 for making molds from bread is the basis for this lesson plan, which begins from the Ms. Fr. 640 recipe and expands to a multi-week series of activities, including learning to make bread, experimenting with different techniques of molding, and, finally, casting wax (or the oft-used historical casting material, sulfur) into bread. The lesson is an effective way to introduce students to embodied experience and knowledge.

Making Stucco for Molding

This stucco activity uses rye flour or chalk, mixed with a binder (tragacanth gum in Ms. Fr. 640), materials that can prove very sticky and messy, but this activity is a great way to learn about the production of low-cost, often temporary ornamentation of walls and other surfaces. Plan for one session of mixing and molding, after which the stucco ornaments are dried. Allow sufficient time for clean up!

Dyeing with Natural Colorants

Exploring the world of color is an wonderfully engaging way to introduce hands-on work and material literacy. Dyeing with natural colorants takes this a step further by looking at how textiles were imbued with color from plants (roots, bark, flowers, leaves, and berries) and animals (insects and shellfish) before the advent of synthetic dyes in the nineteenth century. Textiles (and, by extension, dyes) have and continue to be one of the largest industries in the world. Their complex history, global reach and ubiquity, complex chemistry, and transformative craft process provide multiple points of engagement. Dyeing can also be paired with lake pigment making described below, as the colorants are extracted from the same organic materials using similar chemical processes. The Making and Knowing Project and collaborators have adapted these activities in a number of settings, from chemistry labs to public events to home kitchens. With the preparation of dyeing stations, simple dyeing can be carried out in two hours or less.

Making Paints from Pigments and Painting Them Out

Making paints from pigments is an eye-opening way to get to know substances that are today mostly acquired readymade. Making lake pigments is the transformation of organic materials from dyes (which are water soluble) into pigments (which are particles that can be painted out). Lake pigments can be paired with dyeing described above, as the natural colorants from which color is obtained are the same. Ideally, this activity takes three sessions, though it can be adapted into one or two sessions only. With advance preparation, mineral pigments, such as azurite, take just under two hours to prepare (not counting the mussel feast you can hold the night before to collect the mussel shells!). Verdigris must “grow” slowly over a month or more before sufficient amounts will form to make the pigment to be painted out. Painting out the pigments after binding them with different materials (egg yolk, egg white, oils, or gums) can be quite easy and quick, depending on how many binders the students are provided to experiment with.

Transforming Natural Plant and Insect Colorants into Pigments (Lake Pigments)

Mineral Pigments

Making Paint, Preparing Supports, and Painting Test Panels

Pigments (colored particles) must be combined with binding materials such as egg yolk, egg white, oils, or gums in order to create paint. While you can make your own pigments (see above), painting out even ready-made pigments is a crowd-pleasing (and educational!) activity. Making supports for painting (canvas, panel, prepared paper) helps gain an understanding of the crucial importance of the surface for the appearance of the final work of art. This activity can be relatively quick (sewing and stretching canvases) or quite lengthy (preparing panels, which involves nine sessions of applying gesso, allowing it to dry, then scraping and sanding it between each application).

Making Inks

Making ink helps students appreciate the materiality of texts. Making the ink and then writing with it can be done in a single session of 1-2 hours. Ink-making activities included here produce iron gall ink, carbon-based inks, and colored ink made from organic pigment.

Varnishes and Their Many Uses

The ingredients and making process of varnishes changed significantly in the sixteenth century, resulting in a more streamlined making process when compared to the heavy amber and resin varnishes of an earlier period. These new varnishes also changed the appearance of the artworks onto which they were applied. Making varnish is a relatively complex process requiring preparation and is perhaps suited to more advanced classes.

Making “Counterfeit” Jasper

Imitating the texture and visual appearance of jasper stone raises questions about knowledge systems of the past, the historical meaning of imitation and “counterfeit,” and how artisans and scientists explored and explained the precious materials of the natural world. Making jasper involves a number of different processes and can be adapted to different class lengths, depending on how much preparation of materials is done in advance.

Materializing Spiritual Practice: Reconstructing Burn Salve

Reconstructing the burn salve recipe in Ms. Fr. 640 gave the Project significant insights into the meanings and agency of materials. The activity can easily be completed in 1-2 hours.

Hands-on Lesson Plans from Research Essays in Secrets of Craft and Nature

Many essays in Secrets of Craft and Nature describe the reconstruction of a technique in sufficient detail to use the essay itself to formulate a lesson plan that includes hands-on activities. These essays often include lab/field notes that contain even more information for carrying out the process. Each essay discusses themes and includes bibliography that can be integrated into course objectives and class discussion. Suggested essays are listed below, however many more could be explored and adapted for classroom, studio, or lab activities.

Molding with Cuttlefish Bone

Cuttlefish bone is an ancient material that is still used today by goldsmiths to create small cast objects. Objects can be impressed into the soft core of the cuttlefish’s float bone, after which metal or wax can be cast into the mold. Casting could be done with tin or pewter which have low melting points and liquefy easily in a (dedicated) pan on a stovetop or a hotplate.

Several entries in Ms. Fr. 640 mention cuttlefish bone as a material by which to rapidly produce molds, including fols. 91r–v and 145r–v. These entries provide a wealth of information on preparing the bones for molding, impressing models into them, and, finally, casting metals into them. They also contain descriptions of techniques by which an artisan can test the temperature of molten metal before casting. These entries particularly highlight the sensory and bodily knowledge needed by an artisan. In carrying out cuttlefish bone molding and casting, students will learn through experience the value of this sensory knowledge.

Molding Fruits in Sugar

A single recipe in Ms. Fr. 640, on fol. 126r, gives instructions for making sugar casts of fresh fruits. Such cast sugar sculpture was a common sight at lavish banquets held in sixteenth-century European courts and cities. The author-practitioner provides practical instruction and tips for making this delicacy, but also frames his instructions within a set of properties that sugar exhibits as it changes from solid to liquid and back to solid. According to the author-practitioner, in its nature, sugar is by turns fatty, brittle, and sour. This essay explains the meaning of these properties within the author-practitioner’s material imaginary, and the reconstruction clarifies how this material imaginary provided a coherent supporting framework for the practical actions described in the recipe.

  • Essay: Molding Fruits and Animals in Sugar by Celia Durkin and Pamela H. Smith
  • See also the Oberlin College course, Ingenious Making in the Early Modern World, in which each student took a different approach to molding and casting in sugar. Similar to M&K’s Fieldnotes, the following portfolios document the students’ hands-on activities, which included following the recipe for “Molding Fruits in Sugar,” Ms. Fr. 640, fol. 126r:

Imitation Marble

A reconstruction of the rather confusingly titled entry “Varnish for distemper” on fol. 56r of Ms. Fr. 640 shows that this particular varnish was not intended as a finishing layer to protect the paint and give it a sheen, as was customary in the sixteenth century. Instead, it functioned as an ingredient in the process and as a means of creating a specific optical effect—that of imitation marble.

Keeping Dry Flowers in the Same State all Year

The recipe “Keeping dry flowers in the same state all year” (fol. 120v–121r) reflects the author-practitioner’s wider preoccupation with the preservation of flora and fauna for display. In this recipe he provides instructions for drying flowers in sand and in vinegar. A reconstruction of the recipe demonstrates that extensive knowledge of the materials is important not only to the outcome but to their handling.

Sleight of Hand Tricks

Ms. Fr. 640 contains a number of jokes and sleight of hand tricks. One entry on fol. 43v is for “Varied and Transmuted Wine,” which contains no wine, but transmutes red “wine” into white. This activity is very simple and easy to integrate into any classroom setting. It also raises interesting questions about deception in art making. What is this recipe doing in a compilation of practical techniques?

Making and Using Fish Glue

The making of an essential material for the early modern workshop.

Making and Knowing Assignments for Hands-on Process

All Making and Knowing courses require students to keep records of their hands-on processes, reflections, and learning, conceived as a combination of lab and field notes.

  • Introduction to Field Notes - a full discussion of how the Making and Knowing Project asks students to record and reflect upon their hands-on work.

Making and Knowing courses also require projects of the students’ own devising, assigned early in the term.