Geography Cookies - Countries of Africa

Between Mama Panya's Pancakes, which takes place in Kenya...


...and the sad, Sunday morning headlines of another church bombing in Nigeria, followed by a missions presentation during our Sunday school hour, from a team just returned from Uganda, our minds were turned to Africa, this weekend.

Technically, we're with the Medes and Persians at the time of Queen Esther in our studies right now, but the temptation to detour over a continent, for a day or two, was too great to resist.

I found myself rolling and cutting cookie dough, this morning (and for most of the day). Somehow it just doesn't feel like a geography lesson in our house, unless there's a cookie map to go with it.

We made up one batch of sugar cookie dough, and printed an enlarged "map of Africa" coloring page, to cut out...




...and use as templates for cutting the sugar cookie, country shapes, with a small pumpkin carving knife. This process proved a little difficult, so I took over while the children practiced their knowledge of Africa with a map matching game at KidsGeo.com.


We baked the cookies for 13 minutes, even the tiny pieces, and allowed them some time to cool...


...before frosting them with food color tinted, butter-cream frosting in a variety of map-like colors.


We started piping on country abbreviations as well, before deciding they were less than helpful for identifying the English names of the countries, and we'll simply check our map, before picking which countries to eat our way through...



...as we join David Livingstone, at story time, on a quest to find the source of the Nile, and a quick look at early Christian missionary work, and British colonialism, in Africa.



It's great to be a homeschooler.