Exploring… Africa

As a part of our pretend travel days we have explored many places, including exploring Africa by pretending to travel to Kenya, Egypt, Morocco and Nigeria. Africa has turned out to be the most beautiful and diverse of places and has been a joy to discover. I know there are so many more countries for us to uncover as we explore this amazing continent. In the future I have plans to pretend to visit South Africa and Tunisia. Let me know about any other suggestions you have – I am always, always learning!

Kenya

My husband is desperate to go on a real Kenyan Safari and I can absolutely see the appeal; but until our lottery numbers come up we need to content ourselves with a visit to the zoo! Luckily for us, not far from home is the wonderful Knowsley Safari Park and we visited there on our Kenyan themed day shortly after the lockdown rules were relaxed in the summer of 2020. Freddie especially was amazed by the animals (especially after so much time at home) and an absolute highlight was driving past the rhinos.

We did a number of crafting activities on our Kenyan day and the kids very much enjoyed making their own Maasai warriors out of wooden pegs. I also made Mandazi – which are African donuts and are very delicious and we dug for gems! We watched the Lion King too as a great end to the day – all cosied up on the couch! You can read more about our adventures here.

Egypt

Our pretend visit to Egypt started, unsurprisingly, with a visit to the museum. Luckily for us, our local museum has a really great Egyptian room and the displays really bring this incredible country to life. One of the most fun things we did was having a competition to wrap each other in toilet roll and create Egyptian mummies when we got home! We had enjoyed looking at the Egyptian writing in the Museum and so we used Google to help us to write the kids names in Hieroglyphics. Penny dressed up as Cleopatra too after we read about her in one of her favourite books.

We also used a gifted Feast box to make a delicious Egyptian meal and it was brilliantly pre-measured and packaged up ready for them to make an Egyptian Koshari. Penny and mark did the cooking much to my delight (these photos also reminds me it took days to get her Cleopatra makeup off!). You can find out more about our pretend day in Egypt here!

Morocco

Our visit to pretend Morocco was inspired by a day trip we took to Tangier from Spain. I absolutely love Moroccan food too and had discovered that there was a fab Moroccan restaurant in Liverpool, just down the road from us! The food was amazing and the rest of the day was great fun too!

We did one of my favourite ever crafting activities on this day – making Moroccan glasses. I had some plastic coloured glasses that I had bought from the garden section in Waitrose years ago – I think they still sell them, and at this time of year in Britain these types of glasses are readily available and not very expensive. So, because I was using glasses we already had, my only expense was a gold sharpie which I bought from eBay for a couple of pounds. We actually still use these glasses and they make me smile every time! I made mint tea to drink and watched Aladdin. To find out more about our day in Morocco click here.

Nigeria

I was pretty proud of my idea to turn disposable coffee cups into Nigerian drums. We stuck them together with masking tape and then we cut a circle of baking paper and taped it carefully to the top and painted them brown. Finally, when they were dry we stuck spots around the edges (left over from our school Easter bonnet creation) and behold our very own Nigerian Drums!

It was very difficult to find Nigerian food in Liverpool but we had some pretty yummy jollof rice with chicken. Penny and Freddie had a fried sort of curried vegetable rice (which Freddie LOVED) and some chips (just in case)! It was delicious. Our adventures in Nigeria were very early during our pretend travels (look at baby Freddie) – you can discover more here.

And so that is a snap shot of our African adventures. We so enjoyed exploring Africa by pretending to travel to Kenya, Egypt, Morocco and Nigeria. Keep an eye out for more and let me know if you have any ideas about where we should pretend to visit next.