Our New & Improved Montessori Inspired Continent Boxes for Our Homeschool

I made our original continent boxes when Emily was in preschool/kindergarten. They were well loved and worth every minute of time I spent putting them together. She learrned so much from just playing with them that I knew when we started Traveling the World I wanted to update them for her.

Please keep in mind before you read any further, continent boxes do not have to be elaborate to be effective. In fact nothing in homeschool needs to be elaborate to be effective. Our plastic boxes filled with laminted maps I printed worked perfectly for over three years. If that is all you can do right now then do it! That’s what I did. I swooned over the boxes I saw on Pinterest and then made do with what we had.

Continent boxes are a great way to introduce geography and more to your child in a fun, hands-on way. We love ours!

But, after three years of swooning I had the opportunity to make my dream continent boxes for our homeschool. I started with the gorgeous, well made wooden boxes by Treasure from Jennifer. The thing I love the most about these boxes is that they have the continent name and shape in the corrsepsonding Montessori color on the front and top as well as a map underneath the lid of where that continent is located.

Continent Boxes

For the most part every box has the same contents in it, I wanted the items inside to become familiar to Emily. That way each time she got a box out she would know what to expect within it.

Africa

Antarctica

Asia

Australia/Oceania

Europe

North America

South America

A few of the ways I’m planning on using our continent boxes include pulling one each time we’re studying that continent in our Traveling the World curriculum, strewing them, and letting her free play with them. I don’t use these boxes with any specific expectations other than to  help make learning geography more fun and hands-on.

If you’d like to pair a game with your continent boxes our favorite one is Continent Race by Byron’s Games. It’s a card game and a race to see who can collect the most countries from each continent first!

Want To See How Our Continent Boxes Have Changed?

What you see above is actually my second pass at creating continent boxes for Emily. When she was younger, we had the following in our boxes.

I filled each box with books, a printable map, a bulletin board map and name cutout, safari toob pieces and eventually they will each have reusable craft that she will make.

The Early Years

Africa

My craft plan for Africa is for us to make a African Mask.

Antarctica

My craft plan for Antarctica is to make a penguin snow-globe.

Asia

We painted our own fans to keep in this box as a craft project.

Australia

My craft plan for Australia is to make boomerangs.

Europe

My craft plan for Europe is to design our own coat of arms.

North America

My craft plan for North America is to make a paper towel tube totem pole.

South America

My craft plan for South America is to make a rain stick.

Five Oceans

My craft plan for Five Oceans is to make a ocean sensory bottle.

I also purchased the Around the World Toob and the World Landmark Toob and placed each landmark in the correct continent box. We also have the Geo Puzzles that we keep on the shelves as well and we pull them out when we pull a box out. We have coins from most of the continents as well that we explore, but those are kept in daddy’s collection not in our boxes.

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