Our First Salt Dough Map

As we are continuously studying Ancient History, we included some Geography as well. And which continent is perfect when you just studied Ancient Egypt, Joseph, and Moses: Africa.

Here is a picture of the final map:

The kids had so much fun making this, they didn't realize that they were learning and applying what they had learned previously. I think it came out really good.

You will need a pizza box (old or new), a printer to print the maps, a sharpie, the ingredients for the salt dough, paints, and

I found the recipe for the salt dough online. They are many out there, but we used this one - their Africa map looked intriguing enough for us. Before we could start, we needed to find a map big enough for our outline, I printed it on four pages from this website. Then we needed a physical map of Africa, which I printed from this page. We cut out the big map, taped it together, and then traced the outline onto the pizza box. We tried to be as accurate as possible.

Next, we mixed all the ingredients together:

Coqui really doesn't like to get his hands dirty! He is still smiling here, but soon he had enough and Peanut and I finished mixing it all together.

The next part was so cool: to see Africa take shape in front of us.

Honestly, they did all this by themselves, they just needed some help with the rivers.

 When the map was done and some dough leftover, they wanted to add some African 'things', so they sculpted a pyramid, a snake, and a volcano.

 The map needed to dry for at least a day, but we had to wait for two days to get back and paint it. The weather was nice, so we headed outside for this.

We really enjoyed this and can't wait to make another salt dough map of a different continent.