Who doesn’t love getting snail mail?
Postcards are a great way to cultivate an interest in other countries and cultures.
With summer vacation just around the corner, now’s a great time to start collecting and sending postcards!
Fun and Easy Postcard Activities
• Write to your family. Do you travel for work? Send a postcard to your family with a brief message about the place you’re visiting. Not going overseas? No worries – your child can still learn about different cultures and places in your home country. For example, how are the food, architecture or the way people talk different?
• Ask friends for postcards. When friends or family travel overseas, ask them to send your family a postcard while they’re away. If you get multiple cards from one person, use a real map or Google Earth to help your kids re-create the sender’s trip.
• Encourage kids to send postcards. Pick up some postcards when you are traveling to send to friends and family back home. Help your kids write a short message about the country, region or culture they visited. Maybe they can even add a few words in the local language!
• Buy extra copies of postcards as keepsakes. Once you’ve returned home, use your postcard souvenirs to create vacation scrapbooks.
• Make a do-it-yourself calendar. Choose 12 postcards, one for each month of the year. Help your kids learn about national holidays and add some cultural notes for each month. For example, for July, you could use a postcard from France to coincide with Bastille Day.
• Save the stamps. You can learn a lot from looking at the stamps issued by other countries. What famous people are depicted? What about important events in the country’s history? If there is an animal or plant on the stamp, is it something you see in your own country?
Do you have any other ideas for using postcards to learn about other countries and cultures? Please share them in the comments box below.
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Okay, so apparently I’ve been living under a very big rock (true, but it was a book deadline) and I did not see this site until today. You have done an excellent job here, Justine. The content is top-notch and the concept is totally focused and compelling. Way to go!
Thanks for visiting and for the great ideas. Comparing how the place looks in reality versus the postcard image can be a real eye-opener. And it is cool to think about the underlying messages – how a culture sees itself
based on what images and locations that are deemed “representative”. I have a. Collection of postcards and I am struck especilly by those countries that have a lot of images of people. For example, in Eritrea I found a lot of ethnographic-type postcards with photos of different ethnic groups and individuals. They are real-life snapshots as opposed to the more typical shots of people drssed in folkloric customs that you find elsewhere around the world. I wonder, however, about how the bottom line affects these choices, i.e. whatever sells is what gets put on the postcards?
Hey Justine,
Great ideas! I also think it’s fun to look at different postcards from the same place to see how it’s presented. For example, what does “Kansas” look like to most people (e.g. tourists or those who buy postcards)? And then I try to examine the actual place to see if the postcards match up. How well do the postcards reflect the actual culture of the place?
Not sure how kid-friendly this is, but it’s fun for sociologists like us–or at least like I will be in a few years.
Take care,
Jen
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