Continents Box: ANTARCTICA

Lovely chose the Antarctica continent box off the shelf today, discovered the penguins, & ran off to put them in the bath toys basket where they used to live! Hmmmm, still in the sensitive period for order I see. I asked him to (read: insisted ;) that he bring them back because they live in the Antarctica box now. He was dubious.

Then I showed him our map in the reading corner & pointed out that something is missing - Antarctica! We've had "issues" with this map before! And then I got the globe out & showed him where it really is. Now, if only I would make that continents globe I'm planning...

So, as you can see - I don't have a lot in this box, but I do have a cool set of penguin cards that I got from Jo's blog A Bit of This and A Bit of That & a set of penguins that I think I got from The Sunrise Learning Lab :) Lovely & I matched the penguins to the cards which is easier said that done!

What is in your Antarctica box if you have one or, if you don't, what would you put in one?

Continent Box: ASIA

The contents of our Asia Continent Box, a work in progress...

Middle Eastern Nesting Dolls. I think these are wonderful. One of my close friends was living in Dubai for a few years & brought this as a gift for my boys. Unfortunately we lost the tiniest doll - a camel! - the day we got it. I'm sure it's under a floorboard somewhere...

The Vietnamese flag, courtesy of my mama.

Assorted money, mainly from Indonesia and Malaysia.

A coin from the United Arab Emirates (am I the only one who feels weird thinking of the Middle East as part of Asia?)

Brass statues from Thailand.

The incense cones I bought recently. They smelt really toxic (!) when I burnt one so we'll just look at them now I think.

I Ching coins.

A goddess postcard, chopsticks & the tie from the traditional white outfit many boys wear in the MIddle East (I need to ask my friend what it's called because I can't remember) - we have the full outfit in the costumes area.

I also have a great set of cards of children from Asia that C from Sunrise Learning Lab very kindly sent me a year (or more!) ago and probably lots of other bits and pieces that I should gather.

BTW, there is a *back to school* giveaway at Sunrise Early Learning. Go enter!

Continent Boxes

I found the doll from Norway in the car :) Her eyes do open but she's old so they don't open much!

I also put our Continent Boxes out in a more obvious spot! Previously Lovely was too little to have free access to them but I think it should be fine now although I'm still keeping the money separately as I'm sure lots of it might 'disappear' ;) Both boys are always playing shops & other games were money is required & I'm happy that mostly the money they use is glass beads & stones :)

My Continent Boxes are a set of fabric covered photo boxes. You may notice that there is actually 8 boxes on our shelf - yes, I know that there are only 7 continents! - but having only 7 boxes would drive me crazy (too aesthetically unbalanced!) so I bought 8. The last one is un-labelled but I plan to use it for objects & information about Space, Planet Earth as a whole and the Universe.

I took an overhead photo of the North America box laid out (Lovely was interested in it this morning when I went to pack away our latest thrifty finds) but the photo was a bit soft. I'll post a better one later though you can obviously see a bit of it here.

I had been thinking of blogging about the contents of each box & then read a post today from Gigi at Montessori Spanish - her North America box is wonderful! - which inspired me to kick it off. Thanks Gigi :)

$6.50 well spent

It never ceases to amaze me what wonderful treasures you can find when you go thrifting. This was today's booty:

A beautiful old Van Gogh print.

"Sunflowers".

These 2 cultural dolls to put into our Montessori Continent Boxes. I think the boys will love the Beefeater. I also bought a little girl doll from Norway but can't find her now. Don't you love that the Polynesian (?) mama is wearing her baby. That's him tucked in behind her shoulder :)

A wooden box. A Montessori Mama can never have too many wooden boxes!

A Melissa & Doug magnetic calender (like this) but without any magnets. It's a little ugly at the moment but I've been wanting to find something like this so will have to think of some customisations :)

A Canadian flag pin.

And a box of Chinese incense cones. Maybe I'll just burn these or maybe I'll put them in our Asia box.

What good thrifting have you done this week?