A world map of stamps

Jake collects lots of things. Marbles. Stones. Sea shells. Seeds. And stamps. Around lunchtime every day he runs down the stairs, all the way from the third to the ground floor, to check the letter box for letters or postcards with stamps on them. Sadly, very little of our mail has a good old-fashioned stamp attached to it. With the help of his two stamp-collecting grandfathers and a number of friends who kindly keep any stamps they come across, he has managed to generate a collection of several hundred stamps. They come from all over the world, some of them from countries Jake has not even heard of.
This week, Jake took out his stamp album to see which countries the stamps come from and where these countries are. We laid out a huge world map on a piece of thick cardboard. Using pins, Jake marked the countries from which he holds stamps. Tanzania, Iceland, Paraguay, Romania, Japan, Madagascar... Allocating twenty countries to their respective continents and finding them on the map took almost the entire morning. Sophie and Jake were proud of the result. They went downstairs to check the letter box three times that day - just in case someone has happened to send us a postcard from Mauritius...