Botswana Unit

As I write up our Botswana Unit I had to go back and review it because we completed this over a year ago. I guess it’s kind of nice that I like watching the Geography Now videos because I happily watch them when we’re not doing our geography lessons.

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Botswana Unit resources

Another country with no real books to read at our library. While my library has fairly decent books, I wish we had more for geography.

Here are some sites with decent information:

• 50 Botswana facts
• National Geographic Botswana facts page
• Botswana page– at first glance I thought this was going to be a Botswana government tourism page, but I don’t think it is

It’s early in the alphabet, so the flag is still part of the episode. I so love learning about the ideas behind flags.

Botswana Unit recipe: Beef Stew (Seswaa)

Okay when I looked up Botswana recipes the first few that came up were Malva pudding, and I’ve had really mixed results making any pudding that isn’t instant, so I discarded that. The next one was Seswaa, also known as Beef stew kind of sort of.

I actually waited about a week after we studied Botswana to make our Seswaa because we literally had roast beef sandwiches the day before, and it seemed a bit too soon to make beef again.

Seswaa ingredients

• beef shoulder roast (which in my mind translates to whatever large cut of beef I can find for the slow cooker), upon reading the instructions you could also buy stew meat which is pre-chopped up
• 1 onion quartered
• 2 cups water (I grabbed a jar of pot roast starter from my freezer, I keep the broth from previous pot roasts and it makes it delicious)
• 1 package Lipton onion soup mix (I keep a jar of copycat in my pantry and measured out 1/4 cup)
• 1 teaspoon black pepper
• 5 bay leaves

Let’s make that Seswaa

This is super duper difficult:

1. Their instructions say to chop it into smaller pieces. Yeah, I so did not do that. I left it whole to cook. I browned the outside on the stove top.
2. Put in the slow cooker (clean up is 2 million times easier if you use a slow cooker liner, I get a box sent every month from Amazon), and dump the rest of the ingredients on top of it
3. Cover and cook on high 4-5 hours or low for 8.
4. This is why I decided you could just stick the whole thing in there, because then you shred the meat with forks. I’ll modify written instructions once I’ve actually done this. Expect a fair amount of crossing stuff out.

Botswana Seswaa

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This slow cooker meal is a perfect addition to a Botswana unit

Prep Time 10 minutes

Cook Time 4 hours

Total Time 4 hours 10 minutes

Ingredients

• 2 pound beef roast
• 1 onion chopped
• 2 cups broth
• 1 package onion soup mix
• 1 teaspoon black pepper
• 5 bay leaves

Instructions

1. Brown your pot roast on the stove top.
2. Place the beef in the slow cooker.
3. Add the pepper, onion soup mix, and bay leaves.
4. Pour the broth over the pot roast, the meat should be mostly covered, but not quite.
5. Cover and cook on high for 4 hours or low for 8 hours.

So this was delicious, and we served it with roasted potatoes, which is currently my favorite way to serve potatoes. But, it’s also pretty much how we already made pot roast, so it wasn’t really a big difference.

Botswana notebooking pages

I grabbed our Africa notebooking pages and we filled them out. This was around when I quit really working hard to make minibooks for every country, so no notebooking pages here.

It was rather amusing to see just how much of Botswana has to do with rivers, most of my geography I wrote down was related to water.

But our fun facts:

• they had a section of Botswana that is literally a few meters wide
• it’s the third least densely populated country in Africa
• the least corrupt government in Africa (this is a rather sad fact to learn)
• they have salt mines
• Their seal is just really cool looking (this is not a fact, just my opinion, wait no, I’m gonna say a national seal with zebras on it is definitely cool)

Nice and simple geography unit, sometimes it’s nice to have a simple lesson.

More learning fun

• Alabama Unit
• World War 1 resources
• 11th-grade homeschool curriculum choices
• Wordsmith Craftsman
• 11th-grade books made into movies

“Baobab sunset, Botswana” by Derek Keats is licensed under CC BY 2.0.