Africa - Salt Dough Model - Weeks 13-17

Ok - so I wanted to make a small salt dough map of Africa for the beginning of our Africa studies.  I didn't want it to be elaborate and time consuming like the one we did for Italy back week 6.  So....I came up with an idea and thought I'd see how it worked.  It worked well so I'm sharing it here....

I took a map of Africa.  I then took wax paper and layed it over top of the map.  I made up a batch of salt dough (1 cup salt, 1 cup flour and add water 1/4 cup at a time till consistency is that of playdough).  Next I rolled out the dough to make it flat and placed it over the map.  I then cut the map out with a soft butter knife.  (In hind sight it would have been easier to just trace onto wax paper, the outline of Africa with a marker and then place that over the saltdough and cut it.)  However, it worked fine for me.  The next thing we did was look up a topographical map of Africa online and then form mountains and major rivers.  We baked it at 250 degrees for about 30 minutes.  We then painted it according to the topographical map I looked up.  We used an old container (I love to recycle them for these type projects!) and placed it inside.

Here is the final project: