Ghana Unit

I always try to find a picture from each country that I write about. This can be challenging because I want to find something that represents that country and frequently what we think of is cultural dress, but I don’t want to picture the people, and I don’t want to fall into stereotypes. I ran into a challenge with Ghana. The picture I found was the Elmina SLAVE castle, and it is very visually striking and it was the only picture I found aside from the flag. So what do I do with this? I’d love to hear opinions from people because I’m rather struggling with this. It’s not what I want for my Ghana Unit, but sometimes geography lessons don’t go the way we want. And more often than not that is what happens when I write up my Africa Units.

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Geography Unit resources

Okay, I’m going to pull up the various resources I can find for Ghana. Let’s see….

• National Geographic for Kids Ghana
• Ghana Facts for Kids
• Ghana on Brittanica

Hmmm… There are not a lot of good sites on this place, sadly. Okay, moving on. Oh wait, when I saved my recipe, I also saved a few sites, so let me add a few more things:

• Ghana Facts
• World Atlas
• Activity Village Ghana

This is early in the alphabet, so Geography Now is only 12 minutes long.

I’m actually going to finish watching the episode way before I finish typing up this post. WAAAAAAY before. Grabbing the Flag Friday episode:

Ghana Unit: Banku with grilled tilapia

I clicked on the link and gleefully laughed and thought, “This recipe!”

So I was working on the recipe and it was going okay but the directions weren’t great, so I was complaining about it, and so The Artist came over looked at the recipe and proceeded to tell me it is not acceptable to use a recipe from wattpad. “Mom! Wattpad is for fanfiction, not for recipes.” Then she commented on the emoji. There is only one emoji, but there is an emoji in the recipe.

Apparently you should not put emojis in recipes if you want to be taken seriously. Or use text speak. So, with that, keep that in mind when I give you this recipe. I’m actually not sure that it’s worth making a recipe card because I truly doubt anyone will want to try repeating this, but I will, just in case someone is able to make it come out right. I will write how it went, and then I will write how I think it was supposed to go.

Ingredients for meal

• 2 cups of cornmeal
• 1 cup of cassava dough
• 1 tablespoon of salt
• 4 cups of water
• 1 tilapia filet per person
• 2 medium-sized onions diced
• 2 medium-sized tomatoes diced
• about 1 tablespoon of ginger minced
• 4 cloves garlic minced
• 1 tablespoon pepper (the original recipe said fresh pepper green)
• cooking oil

Putting together this unique recipe

1. In a pot over high heat mix together the cornmeal, cassava flour, salt, and water. Stir and allow to cook for 5-10 minutes. I really have no clue, but my best guess is that long. The original recipe says until it gives off a nice smell and changes color. This might have been when The Artist came down and started mocking the recipe, “Mom! This has a corn emoji! An emoji!”
2. Continue stirring and wonder, is this enough of a color change? What constitutes a delicious smell?
3. Guess this might be long enough and pull it off, then mold them into balls. Decide to cook them extra on a hot skillet just in case. I have no clue what they should look or taste like.
4. Yeah, actually looking at this, I am so not making a recipe card because I truly have no clue how long to tell you to cook this monstrosity.
5. Anyway, while that monstrosity is cooking, in another pan heat the oil that it should say to have, goes up to ingredient list and adds cooking oil.
6. Mix together the onions, ginger, and pepper. Look at the recipe and realize it never said when to add the tomatoes, and look at my picture and realize I NEVER ADDED THE TOMATOES! When was I supposed to do that? What happened to the tomatoes?
7. Wait, I found the tomatoes in the recipe, it’s a random additional ingredient at the end. Okay, I don’t feel as bad now.
8. Okay, so cook the tilapia and the onion, ginger, garlic mix.
9. Then eat that mess.

Yeah, I give up. I have no clue. I don’t blame The Artist for mocking this recipe. It ended with heart eye emoji. I think this was only marginally better than the banana pancake recipe that was also from Africa that just turned into a giant mess we couldn’t cook. At least this I could cook.

So, there you go, that’s the mess. The tilapia turned out fine, because you can’t go wrong with the trinity of garlic, onion, and ginger. Even if I totally forgot to put on the tomato.

Sigh.

Now, I need to go take a picture because I somehow forgot to take a picture of one of my notebooking pages, oh and I have already listened to both of the Geography Now videos, and I’m now on to listening to a random video about the Battle of Hastings. Why not?

Life is crazy.

Ghana Unit: notebooking pages

Okay, I’m back having taken the picture and realized I need to fill out two countries of notebooking pages so I have sample pages to share just so I have ALL of the countries completed. We had four countries we didn’t complete by the time the kids had graduated much to my dismay. But, we used the Africa notebooking pages and filled them all out.

Okay I’m going to finish this really quick so I can go start dinner.

• They have fashion coffins
• the largest manmade lake
• and an extinct volcano

More great lesson ideas

• Democratic Republic of the Congo Unit
• Me on the Map: Me
• Make a Cuneiform
• Stomach acids work
• Little Princess book club

• By Dave Ley – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=221795
• Aerra Carnicom, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons