Learning Through Stamps

We received free stamps from the Postal History Foundation and used them to learn by creating a beautiful scrapbook stamp album.

The Postal History Foundation offers stamp packets for educators - (home school, private school, public school and other educators). On the website there are spaces to indicate how the stamps will be used and how many students are involved. The stamps are free, but they accept donations and appreciate money for shipping expenses. After reading about this awesome free resource on The Traveling Sisterhood I immediately requested some stamps for my children.

Since my daughter loves myths and legends I requested a packet of Mythology stamps. I thought the Aqua duct packet would go well with our Ancient Roman studies and I requested plants and leaves because my son is currently very interested in plants.

My daughter already has a stamp collection of her own and an inherited one. In the past she spent a great deal of time sorting them by country and then pasting them on appropriate pages in a great big book. For American stamps she sorted them by date and placed them in a different album.

Although this provided many hours of amusement, she soon grew tired of the activity. With an infinite number of stamps available this task was never complete. It was easy to identify which country some stamps came from, but not so for others. By mounting stamps on a country page their beauty could be appreciated, but often, little was known about what was on the stamps. Needless to say, she lost interest and the stamps sat untouched for a year.

When we received the new packets of stamps I suggested a new way to organize them which was more like scrapbooking. I suggested she select a few stamps (2-10) that she was interested in and focus on them. By looking up information the stamps would have more meaning. She loved the idea and spent the entire weekend working on her stamp collection and has more work planned.

I'm so excited that she liked this idea and hope her interest continues. Researching, writing, history, art, reading, science and music (for particular stamps) are all covered. She can spend her summer educating me and herself.

Here's a close-up of the aqua duct stamps. She wrote:

"This aqua duct was originally constructed as a wall in the Byzantine Empire from 1530-1536. In later periods until 1911 it brought water to the city."

"This aqua duct was constructed to bring water to a city named Akko (sometimes called Acreu). Akko is located in Israel orn the coast of the Mediterranean."

"Mr. Johan Sebastian Bach came from a very musical family. Over 70 of his relatives made their livings as musicians. He was a German composer and during his life he made extra money by repairing organs. One time he worked for a prince until he felt the prince was getting too bossy and decided to leave. When the prince found his plans out, he had Bach thrown into jail until he finally let him go. Bach died in 1750."