Eating Egypt

We love geography: maps, globes, atlases, all of it! But we’ve definitely taken our geography to new heights with our Egypt study. It’s one thing to make a map, but it’s something entirely different to get to eat your map after you’ve made it!

We’ve been working on learning the map of Egypt. Each day we’d review the different places on the map that I wanted them to remember. The first couple of days, we do this with the Teacher map that includes the names and locations. We finished the week reviewing with a blank student map. Finally, I finish the map work by having each of the kids label a blank map. I got the idea from The Jobe Journal to actually create labels for the kids to stick onto the map, since neither of my kids are really at the age for filling out blanks on a map. This has worked great! They love “stickers” and it gives me a good idea of what they are remembering.

But then came the real fun. I baked some cookie dough and got out the frosting.

We frosted the entire cookie first. Our desert or “Red Lands” were decorated with colored sugar sprinkles. The kids (with a little oversight and direction) frosted the fertile flood plains (or Black Land), the Nile River, and the Nile River Delta. I had originally planned for our pyramids to be chocolate chips, but it wasn’t until after we finished frosting our cookie that I realized I was out of chocolate chips. After a brief moment of panic, I remembered that I did have tootsie rolls. So I pinched off tootsie roll and shaped it into pyramids for the kids to place on their cookies.

After all that hard work, I was barely able to get pictures before the kids were begging to “eat Egypt.” Let’s just say, this is one map they won’t forget soon.