I was so inspired by the map of the United States made entirely from empty cereal boxes that I saw on Inhabitots recently that I embarked on the nice project of making one of Europe with my son.

What seemed initially a quick and easy project to complete was in actual facts a little more elaborate than I anticipated which made a nice change from the easy crafts we normally do on weekends. Our map of Europe took over a week as we did it in stages and entailed a lot of preparation work.

It was pretty straight forward to cut out Western Europe but when it came to Eastern Europe and all those countries you mistakenly forget it gets a little more complicated. We looked for every country and drew out a map for each one using tracing paper to make our shapes to then cut from the recycled cartons. The most difficult part was to find maps in the same scale as they had to be compiled into one big map of Europe so we needed to keep the proportions right. This was impossible to do for the every country so we actually had to draw the missing maps by hand as accurately as we could. It was a process, but a fun one and definitely an educational journey through Europe as now I can picture where every single country is in Europe and you never know when this kind of information might come in handy! 

We don’t eat enough cereals to complete the whole projects so we used other products as well, like ice creams – we have a lot of those – pasta and anything colourful and empty. It was rewarding to use some of those boxes that would be otherwise discarded even though they would go in the paper recycle bin.

In the end we are proud of the result and the map is already on my son’s bedroom wall. On top of that both my son and I have had a good geography lesson!