This week I decided to welcome my students back from their weekend by getting a little bit messy. Today we began preparing or salt dough lab that we will be working on for the next few days…but before we preformed our lab we first had to create some salt dough. In the video above, you can see John and Jake mixing up their dough…by hand. There are other ways to mix up this dough that are less messy, but before we discuss that lets talk about how Joh and Jake make their dough.
First of all we had to prepare a suitable container for their dough mixture since we would not be able to get them it today…for this we used Zip-Lock Bags. Students were put into groups of 2 and asked to label a bag for their mixture.Next would come adding the ingredients. For our mixture we combined 170 mL of flour, 170 mL of salt, and 100 mL of dough…very simple. Students would then mix these basic ingredients in their Zip-Lock Bags and then let them set for the night.

The whole reason behind preparing this salt -dough is to use it to form a geographical map of Arkansas that displays the 6 geographical regions of Arkansas (Ozark Mountains, River Valley, Crowley’s Ridge, Ouachita Mountains, Mississippi Delta, and the coastal plain). On Tuesday we will mold our dough into a shape of Arkansas and form these regions based on their geographical features…stay tuned, more updates to come.

Mr. McClung