Stamp Collecting For Kids: The Sorting Begins

Do you have any hobbies or collections that you share with your children?  I’ve always liked stamps, postcards, and post marks.  The children have been enjoying sending and receiving postcards through Postcrossing for a couple of years now.  The postcards will come in very handy when we learn about different countries as they will make a fantastic resource for the continent boxes I would like to create this year. But first, we’re sorting the postage stamps.

Last year I was organising our attic and I had boxes of old letters from around the world from my years of writing to pen pals. I still keep in touch with a few, but many have been lost along the way, or perhaps we only exchanged a letter or two.  I decided I could now part with these letters (but keeping the ones that I still have contact with).  But I simply just couldn’t part with the variety of beautiful and interesting postage stamps from so many places.  I had cut the corners off of the envelopes and kept the postage stamps and post marks in a bag for the past year.

This year, I decided that it was time to finally get things going and begin to organize these stamps!

One miserable day when the weather was not for going out in due to gale-force winds and bucketing rain, it seemed the perfect time for the children and I to sit down together and have some stamp-sorting fun.

There are many, many ways to sort stamps: by subject, date issued, events, animals, flowers, transportation, etc.  But I thought that for our purposes the easiest way to sort this collection would be by country.

I used some plastic envelopes and wrote the names of the countries I knew there were stamps from on the front of them using a Sharpie.

We all gathered around and began to sort, stopping only for some delicious soup at lunch time.  When we had finished we found we had stamps from over 40 different countries, but the majority of them are from the UK, Canada, and the USA (and so many more countries to collect from – could you help us out?).

This was enough work for one afternoon, but Tristan had just enough energy left to begin sorting through his personal collection himself.

But first, he had to get his desk (table) ready by setting up his name plate his Auntie made for him!

That’s better!

Now he was ready to work in his office.  This stamp collecting is serious business for a young boy!

We’ll be returning soon to soak our stamps and begin placing them into our collection books.

Do you collect stamps or know of anyone who does?  What do you see as the benefits of it? How do you sort your stamps?