Wednesday, March 3, 2010

The Salt Dough Map

One of the unwritten requirements of homeschooling seems to be that you must, at some point in your adventure, make a salt dough map with your kids. I don't know why this is, but mine is not to question why. Anyway, a salt dough map seemed like a fun way to gently ease back into school after a couple weeks off.

My idea was to make our own continent with as many geographical features as possible. The kids thought it would be excessively cool to make Wahoo Island from our Wii Resort game. We compromised. Who am I to argue with enthusiasm? We made a mostly authentic Wahoo Island and added a few extra features.


We used this book to learn some new geography terms and figure out how to model them:


We then baked our creation for 3 hours and painted it!


The finished product:


In the end, we had just about everything in there, including:
  • an isthmus
  • a waterfall
  • a river
  • a butte
  • a sea arch
  • a plateau
  • an atoll (well, half of one)
  • a lagoon
  • an erupting volcano
  • beaches
  • caves
  • islands
  • a breaching whale
Good fun!