The first thing you need to think about is what you want to build your salt map on. If you are doing a large map as a group project, you may want to get a piece of plywood. The group maps can be saved and hung on the wall for future classes to study. A piece of sturdy cardboard or pizza box will also work as the base. A pizza box can be used as a display. The students make the map in the bottom of the pizza box, and they place images with captions in the top half of the pizza box.
Salt Dough Recipe
3 cups flour
1 ½ cups of salt
3 cups boiling water
½ tablespoon cream of tartar
½ tablespoon vegetable oil
Place flour, salt and cream of tartar in a large bowl. Add the 3 cups of boiling water all at one time. Cool 10 minutes. Stir with spoon. When the spoon is hard to stir, knead by hand once cooled. Add ½ tbsp. of vegetable oil. Knead again by hand.
You can make this ahead of time and place in zippered plastic bags in the refrigerator to hand out to the kids in class.
Once the dough is made and shaped to the contours you want, let it dry. It needs to dry thoroughly overnight or even longer. You will need tempera paint to paint the landforms and features of the map. Use a selection of colors to represent water, desert, mountains, and valleys.
When the paint is dry, you will want to label the state, cities or countries with labels printed from the computer, or on nicely printed on tag board. Use a toothpick to indent the map while it is still wet to mark the city. There also needs to be a key handwritten neatly, or printed from the computer and glued onto the base. You can get as creative as you like with the paint job. Try using white glitter paint on the snow covered mountains on your map. Paint the base before making the salt map a bright color.