Friday 1 June 2012

Salt Dough Map of Egypt

For our History we are looking at Ancient Civilizations including ancient Egypt and we incorporate Geography into that rather than do it as a seperate lesson. Here is our first foray into the world of salt dough.

First we looked at where Egypt was in the world in our atlas and on the globe.  Next we found an outline map of Egypt courtesy of google and printed it out. This was traced on to the base of a pizza box ( makes storage so much easier!)
Next we made the dough
2 cups of plain flour, 
1 cup of table salt,
 1 cup of water, 
1 tbsp oil Mixed in a bowl.


And moulded it on to the map.

It looks a mess at the moment - I know. By looking at a contour map on the internet, we tried to mould the dough to represent mountain ranges, rivers, we also, for interests sake, added a 'not to scale' pair of pyramids to mark where Giza is. Also we made sure Northern Egypt (lower Egypt)  was shallow and southern Egypt  (upper Egypt)  was thicker - to show why each is named as it is. Eventually little flags are put in on the map to mark main places so using a cocktail stick we pushed in little holes for the flags to stand in once it is finished.
The map was left to dry for a week or so.
Next the children painted the seas, and the land, they labelled the name of the seas, and made their flags.

I labelled the spine of the pizza box so we know in future which map is inside (the plan is to make one of these maps for each new country we look into and keep them to look at for future reference).
And here is the finished product:



Thanks for stopping by! God bless x



3 comments:

  1. Hi!
    Nice job! How fun too!!!
    I absolutely LOVE this idea!
    I plan to do it with my kiddos.
    ~Veronica

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  2. Thank you for posting this wonderful idea! My son and I just created a salt map of Egypt, per your recipe. (Conveniently, we had pizza last night & I asked my husband to bring home a spare box!) This salt map will add greatly to our study of Ancient Egypt. It also served as a terrific motivation for my son to push through less than fun assignments today. :-)

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    Replies
    1. So glad it inspired you Suzanna - I hope it all turned out well for you!

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