Get moving in The Creative Corner with a seriously silly drawing challenge, a visit with the Anna Julia Cooper Episcopal School step team, and a great big outdoor adventure art project. Learn to create blind-contour drawings and land art installations.  

Students learn about various crystals, such as kidney stones, within the human body. They also learn about how crystals grow and ways to inhibit their growth. They also learn how researchers such as chemical engineers design drugs with the intent to inhibit crystal growth for medical treatment purposes and the factors they face when attempting to implement their designs. A day before presenting this lesson to students, conduct the associated activity, Rock Candy Your Body.

Students will explore and identify the basics of melodic direction using aural skills and body percussion or movement. Students will compose their own piece of digital music using stepwise and leapwise melodic direction.

Students learn how crystallization and inhibition occur by examining calcium oxalate crystals with and without inhibitors that are capable of altering crystallization. Kidney stones are composed of calcium oxalate crystals, and engineers and doctors experiment with these crystals to determine how growth is affected when a potential drug is introduced. Students play the role of engineers by trying to determine which inhibitor would be the best for blocking crystallization.

Students see and learn how crystallization and inhibition occur by making sugar crystals with and without additives in a supersaturation solution, testing to see how the additives may alter crystallization, such as by improving crystal growth by more or larger crystals. After three days, students analyze the differences between the control crystals and those grown with additives, researching and attempting to deduce why certain additives blocked crystallization, showed no change or improved growth. Students relate what they learn from the rock candy experimentation to engineering drug researchers who design medicines for targeted purposes in the human body. Conduct the first half of this activity one day before presenting the associated lesson, Body Full of Crystals. Then conduct the second half of the activity.