The post office is a place we rarely "visit" but somehow the children still know this is where we ship and pick up our packages and as such...the post office is an awesome place. For this station, I thought we'd do more than simply pick up packages and drop them off though. I wanted the children to wrap and "address" their packages, affix postage and cancel their "stamps", etc. I also wanted to offer "extra" activities that correlated with the post office: a philatelic society where the children could learn about stamps, handle a few and start a collection. Needless to say, they quite liked that club and are quite happy to have their own little collection of stamps...
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Post Office Register; a nice week means we
get to play pretend outside! |
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| Various post office forms, packaging tape, magazines to mail, etc. |
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A few small empty boxes, air packs and bubble wrap. The children
chose to wrap some zoo animals that day. |
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Post Office register area, complete with scale, "stamps" (christmas
stickers shaped like stamps!) for sale and canceling stamp. |
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Canceling stamps is fun! Some got cancelled
many times! :) |
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| A freshly cancelled letter! |
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Philatelic Society: Brought this out after the kids had been playing
a while; provided was a magnifier, some stamps ripped from old letters
and two small dish with water... |
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Soaking stamps so they can be peeled off their envelopes.
Sadly, more and more stamps are stickers and can't quite be peeled. |
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For our Philatelic Society, I purchased (as a treat!) two stamp kits:
a dinosaur one for my son and an insect one for my daughter.
They examined their stamp and learned how to mount them! |
Wrapping objects has long been an activity the kids enjoy. They sometimes borrow gift bags and silk paper to make pretend presents just so they can open them, so of course, the post office packaging section was busy for a while. Stamping the stamps was also a big winner (who doesn't like stamps?) but not nearly as much as the Philatelic Society. They loved opening their little kits and looking at their new stamps. Mounting them with the hinges was rather difficult so we didn't do a lot of that but discussing where the stamps came from, what was featured on each, trying to sort them by collection...that was good enough for them!
P.S. If you intend on replicating this activity outside, may I suggest an absolutely calm-non windy day? ;)
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