Africa Week 2 of 3



Chin Chin

We thought this week's lessons would be a little shorter due to the snow on Friday but we still managed to have a 3 hour co-op and squeeze in 4 weeks of planning afterward.  Which the kids loved because it meant they were allowed to go sledding outside while the moms poured over our KONOS volumes.

Now that I think of it, we did not get to everything we had planned for the day but probably we planned too much.  LOL  Here's a rundown of our day:

• Open with Pledge of Allegience and prayer
• Watch a 3 minute Youtube video about salt mining in Africa and have discussion about why this trade is vital to the region.
• Mapping - Mauritania, Mali and Niger  Discuss Timbuktu and its location in relation to the salt mines in this art of Africa (pg 84 Activity # 205)  Also discuss exports from Mauritania (pg 94 # 263)
• Mapping - Nigeria, Liberia, Dem. Rep. of the Congo and discuss rubber tree plantations, share pictures of latex harvesting and discuss Firestone lease in Liberia.  Hand out city maps of all of our represented cities/towns and figure up the acreage in each of our towns.  Combine and then decide how many more of these towns we would need to have to cover one million acres.  More than eleven of each of our represented towns would make up 1,000,000 acres!!! (pg 94 # 264, 265)
• Mapping - Sierra Leone and discuss how this country and Liberia had its beginnings (pg 4 # 262)
• Map Senegal and show peanut butter with the oil seperated.
• Make ground nut soup (pg 92 #244)
• Make chin chin (pg 91 # 243)
• There was also a reading done about Africa but unfortunately, I do not know which book it was so that I can share it with you.  Generally if one of the moms finds a particularly good book about our unit of study, she will bring it to co-op and if we have a bit of time when the moms need to do some quick behind the scenes work, one of the moms will read the book to the kids in the other room.  We have found this to be a wonderful way of using downtime for unexpected glitches and it keeps the kids from disappearing in different directions between activities.

Since we were supposed to be doing the coastal bulge and the Congo this week we obviously missed quite a few countries but we ran out of time so we agreed to finish our mapping at home this week.  Really we bit off more than we could chew for one co-op session.

All references are from KONOS Volume II Inquisitiveness. This is planned from an older edition so my page and activity #'s may not match up with yours but you should be able to find them based on the descriptions. Please leave me a comment if you have trouble finding them and I will be happy to help out.