Ready to take kids on a global adventure without leaving the living room? With a handful of schleich® animal figurines and a few simple supplies, you can create an exciting geography game called Around the World Travel Adventure. This hands-on activity invites kids to explore continents, discover animal habitats, and imagine traveling across the planet.
Whether you're a grandparent planning a creative afternoon or a parent looking for an educational activity that feels like playtime, this simple game blends imagination, storytelling, and geography learning for kids ages 7–8.
What Is the Around the World Adventure?
The Around the World Adventure is an interactive geography activity where kids travel from continent to continent using animal figurines as their “travel companions.” At each stop, children learn where animals live, what their environments are like, and how wildlife adapts to different parts of the world.
Instead of simply sorting animals, kids follow a pretend travel route around the globe—visiting jungles, savannas, oceans, and icy polar regions along the way.
How to Set Up the Adventure
- Create a World Map Station: Lay out a large world map on a table or the floor. You can also draw simple continent shapes on paper or use our printable geography cards [PDF].
- Choose Your Travelers: Gather schleich® animals from different regions—such as jungle animals, African wildlife, Asian wildlife and other ecosystems.
- Start the Journey: Kids pick an animal and place it on the map where it lives. Then they “travel” to the next continent with another animal.
- Tell the Story: As each animal arrives at its home continent, encourage kids to imagine what it sees there—jungles, deserts, mountains, or icy oceans.
Learning Through Exploration
This activity naturally sparks curiosity about animals, ecosystems, and the different places they live.
- Ask Discovery Questions: Why do polar bears live in cold regions? Why do elephants thrive in warm climates?
- Compare Continents: Talk about how environments differ. How is Africa’s savanna different from Antarctica’s icy landscape?
- Locate the Journey: Let kids trace the animal’s path across the map so they begin recognizing where continents are located.
Add a Geography Challenge
Once kids understand the continents, you can turn the adventure into a fun game challenge.
- Guess the Continent: Hold up an animal and have kids guess where it lives before placing it on the map.
- Travel Race: Set a timer and see how quickly kids can place all the animals in the correct regions.
- Explorer Teams: Divide kids into teams and assign each one a continent to explore.
Extend the Around the World Adventure
Want to make the activity even more immersive? Try expanding the adventure with a few creative twists.
- Build Mini Habitats: Use materials like sand, leaves, or cotton “snow” to create environments for each continent. [BONUS: Build an animal habitat with SCHLEICH®.]
- Explorer Journals: Kids can draw the animals they discover and write one fun fact about where they live.
- Animal Travel Stories: Ask kids to imagine their animal going on a journey to another continent and describe what it experiences there.
Why Kids Love This Activity
The Around the World Adventure works because it combines geography, imagination, and hands-on play. Kids get to move animals across the globe, discover new habitats, and create stories about wildlife adventures.
At the same time, they’re building real-world knowledge about continents, ecosystems, and how animals adapt to different environments.
Wrap Up
With just a world map, a few schleich® animals, and a little imagination, kids can learn about continents and explore the amazing diversity of our planet. Activities like this make geography feel less like a lesson and more like an adventure.
Today’s Around the World game might just inspire a lifelong curiosity about wildlife, science, and the big, beautiful world we share.
