Continent Boxes
If you’ve seen my grade leveled homeschooling posts, you’ve seen me mention our Continent Boxes. They have been such a fun part of our homeschooling life, and I love that they continue to grow with us!
When my oldest was first learning the names of the seven continents, I decided to get started with our own little collection of Continent Boxes. I had seen a similar idea on Pinterest and decided to give our own version of it a try. This wasn’t anything that was part of our history curriculum (Abeka) – I just thought it would be a great addition to our learning.
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I began by purchasing seven photo storage boxes from Hobby Lobby. I’ve seen these at various arts and crafts stores – any kind of small box will do.
Then I used my little label marker to label each box the front of each box with a simple little sticker:
- North America
- South America
- Europe
- Asia
- Africa
- Australian
- Antarctica
We placed our Continent Boxes under our large wall map – a fun find we picked up at IKEA several years ago. We love this map, but it was a pain to hang! ha!
As he has gotten older and siblings have joined the fun, we have continued to use these boxes.
How do we use our Continent Boxes?
As we come across interesting items, read about different places around the world, receive a postcard, letter, or special souvenir from someone who has traveled outside of where we live, we add these items to our boxes.
We have:
- postcards from friends who have traveled to Europe
- souvenirs from a trip daddy took to Australia several years ago
- coins collected from mission trips our friends have taken to Central America and South America
- pictures of animals native to Asia
- animal figures (toys) for the various continents
- various other coins, cloth flags, clean/empty food packaging, artifacts, etc. from different continents
and any time we come across a new item that would be a good fit for our Continent Boxes, we add it to the corresponding box.
This is such a simple way to give your kids a global perspective – always connecting the boxes to a nearby map or globe.
It has also been so neat to see how these boxes have helped us make connections as we read different things: passages from a textbook, a living picture book, a missionary biography, etc.
Would these be a good fit for your family? There are no rules for how to do them. There’s no pressure to “finish them” or anything like that – Allow them to grow with your family. We’ve been adding to ours here and there for years now and look forward to seeing what additional items might be placed in our Continent Boxes in the coming years.
Does your child want to learn to play chess?