Postcrossing Blog

Meet Alex (aka Zeby), a very enthusiastic young postcrosser from New Zealand. His mom Marian describes him as a little evangelist who will happily tell everyone he meets about Postcrossing… and he’s doing such a great job that he earned the very special Ambassador badge last year! So of course, we had to have him on the blog for an interview. 😊

Hi Alex! How did you come across Postcrossing? What got you hooked?

My Mum found Postcrossing on the internet one day and thought it looked interesting. She had collected postcards when she was young and she thought I might like to have a new hobby. My brother had started stamp collecting and I wanted to do my own thing, I really like postcards and getting mail, so it was the perfect hobby for me.

Postcrossing has been a great experience so far, it gets even more interesting each day. It gives me the chance to talk to people on the other side of the world. I get to learn about what creatures live in their countries, what their capital city is like and what their lives are like.

I’ve joined in a lot of Round Robins on the Postcrossing Forum, it’s a lot of fun. From the Forum my brother and I have also got penpals our own age — it’s really nice to write cards and letters to other kids.

Do you have any other interesting hobbies?

I’m a Cub Scout. I love earning new badges, last year I earned 12 individual award badges. My twin brother and I got more badges than other Cub in the pack but it was a lot of work to get that many done in the year. Dad joined Cubs as a Leader late last year too and we all went to the Cubs 100 Years Camp in November.

My biggest hobby is reading. I love it. I read a lot, over 200 pages every night but Dad turns the light off if it gets too late. My favourite kinds of books are fantasy books. I got a lot of books for Christmas and I go to the library nearly every week.

Show us your mailbox, your mailman/mailwoman, your postoffice or the place where you post or keep your postcards!

My letterbox is a long way away from my house, it’s a big rural letterbox and we don’t get mail every day in our valley. My postie comes in a van and sometimes I am at the letterbox waiting for him. He was very curious about all the mail I was getting so I told him about Postcrossing, he says I’m keeping him in a job with all my Postcrossing mail.

Here’s me at one of our local postboxes, I normally post my cards here as it’s outside the supermarket.

I have a whole wall of cards on display. There’s one from each country in my collection pinned on the wall and I’ve got string leading to where it’s from in the world.

My world map got too crowded so my uncle gave me a map of Europe.

I swap cards around with my collection boxes and the wall. I have collections of native animals, native costumes, Cold War, volcanoes and space. My brother and I also have a box of Greetings From cards we are collecting. In my room I have my special owl collection on the wall. The house is covered in postcards!

Have you inspired anyone else to join Postcrossing or start collections of their own?

I’ve talked to my gifted education class about Postcrossing. They liked the idea and a lot wanted to join themselves. The teacher liked the idea too because it opens the world to classrooms.

My Scout Pack Master loved my Postcrossing so much she joined. Dad says I talk to everyone I meet about Postcrossing. Everyone who comes in our house gets a tour of my Postcrossing maps!

What is it your favorite part of the Postcrossing process?

I like picking a new person to send a card to and then reading their profiles. I want to know about the people and match a card to them. It’s like a lucky dip, getting a new person. I enjoy sending cards out.

Show and tell us about your favorite received postcard to date, and what makes it special.

I have so many postcards that I love. I don’t have an absolute favourite but so many people have sent me amazing cards. My rarest official card was from Montenegro:

Someone else sent me an official with my name on the front!

My favourite rare country was a card from Antarctica, though it didn’t come from Postcrossing. It was sent from a New Zealand scientist I met, she went down to Antarctica to do some field work this summer.

Is there anything that you are passionate about?

Space is a big passion for me. My hero is Neil deGrasse Tyson, he’s an astrophysicist. I love astronomy and one day I’d like my own telescope to look at the stars. All science is amazing.

I love learning, I want to know as much as possible. I like trying to learn languages. I like learning about history and how the world works. I’m lucky that I’m a worldschooler!

A while ago, we got an email from Chang Chia-Yen (aka Geoian), in Taiwan. He’s a teacher in a secondary school there, and has been using Postcrossing with his classes… with a twist!

For a while, Geoian and his students collected postcard from all over the world, until they received a nice variety of them. Then, they shuffled all the cards together, divided the class into 2 teams and got ready for a mighty game of bingo!

The goal of Geoian’s class bingo is to be the first to make a straight line of 5 items (in this case, postcards), either diagonal, vertical or horizontally across the board, and eventually to complete it. At the start, each team fills up their lattice with postcards they pick, distributed randomly.

Then, conditions are laid out — these are special criteria such as “a multiview card”, “a card from a World Heritage site” or “a card featuring an aurora borealis”. Some are quite specific, while others are broad ranging and might be able to accommodate several different postcards.

They randomly choose the criteria for each turn, list them all on their blackboard, and then the game can start! In each turn, teams choose one postcard that matches the condition at play, and can thus be removed from the board. (Teams can also play some wildcards that change the conditions to better suit their needs… but we won’t go into so much detail). Whoever removes all the postcards from a straight line, makes a bingo!

It seems tricky, and I confess we had a little trouble understanding the concept initially… so the students got together on their own initiative and made a really nice video to show us the game in action! We found it really endearing and were infected by their enthusiasm — so we decided to share it with you all! Here it is:

It’s very nice to see this whole new dimension to exploring postcards — and also to know that the fun doesn’t stop after a card his registered! 😊 A huge thank you to Geoian for coming up with the game, and to all his students who took the time to make this video on own their free time to help us understand their bingo game. They are Angelina and Cathy (the hosts), Jenny and Nini (the videographers), and Linda, Mina, Frank, Duke, Jacob, Gino, Doris and Alex (the players) — thank you guys!

PS – If you’re a teacher or a parent, why not give it a go? Categories can be as convoluted or simple as you’d like, adapting the difficulty level to each children’s skills. Let us know how it goes!

Remember the cute kids who serenaded Postcrossing last year with a lovely rendition of Happy Birthday, both in English and Maori?

Awwww… 😍

The little ones come from Koputaroa, a rural area in the North Island of New Zealand. Their Postcrossing account, Kererū, is both the name of their learning centre and the name of a bird native to the islands. The class has been on Postcrossing for 2 years now, and sent over 400 postcards… they’re very enthusiastic! :) We talked to their teachers about their class and Postcrossing.

How did you come across Postcrossing? What got you hooked?

We came across Postcrossing after making connections with kindergartens and other childhood centres around the world. While many who responded to us were in USA, we wanted to communicate with more centres around the world. A Google search turned up Postcrossing and so our exciting journey began. The children’s delight in receiving postcards of different peoples and places around the world kept us hooked.

Do you have any other interesting hobbies?

We have 3 teachers who have different hobbies. Helen is keen to travel the world and later this year is heading over to Europe with her family for a holiday. Sharee loves listening to music and adores One Direction and Ed Sheeran. I (Faye) personally like to read science fiction books and also enjoy being on my computer.

Show us your mailbox, your mailman/mailwoman, your postoffice or the place where you post or keep your postcards!

This is the mailbox in Foxton where all our cards are sent from. My husband considers it a personal job for him to actually put the cards in the box each time!

What is it your favorite part of the Postcrossing process?

The children love visiting the mailbox at the end of the drive to see if the mail van has left anything for them. They also love choosing the cards that gets sent to the receiving participant. A lot of thought goes into choosing just the right one.

Show and tell us about your favorite received postcard to date, and what makes it special.

This is the prize we won for our video contribution to Postcrossing’s 10th birthday. The children absolutely love it and gather around it at reading time each day to see where Wally is. They consider it a challenge to see how fast they can find Wally!

Have you been surprised by any place that you have received a postcard from or sent a postcard to?

We are absolutely thrilled to receive our two cards from the African continent, and hope for many more. The children have loved the many Finnish postcards that we received before Christmas that had Santa on them.

Is there anything that you are passionate about?

We work with children aged between 2–5 years so anything that interests them on a daily basis is what we are passionate about. With Postcrossing, they love receiving cards which show different foods, dress, cultures, buildings and animals.

Back in May, we introduced you to “We Are One”, a project which brought Postcrossing closer to the children of Tuvalu. The project is now close to its end, and Emily sent us an update filled with really nice photos… we just had to share them with you!

She sums it up:

This project has been an amazing journey for me and the students. Not only were they excited to write on nicely printed postcards of Tuvalu (which is rare or never seen) and introduce it to the world, they were also thrilled to receive postcards, read the kind words from postcrossers and be amazed at the beautiful scenery pictures on a card. It is their fist time ever to learn how to read a map and name the seven continents!

My greatest satisfaction, as a teacher, is to see their thirst for knowledge, wanting to learn more about this world where most countries are too far away to them.

Sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? But a picture is worth a thousand words, so here they are:

Happy children and postcards… guaranteed to make my heart melt!

Emily collected some feedback about the project from the children, and one of them wrote “It’s amazing and I hope that other schools around the world do a similar project”. We hope so too! :)

A huge thank you to Emily for setting up this year’s activity in Tuvalu – and to Taiwan ICDF (International Cooperation and Development Fund) as well, for sending her there and helping fund her postcard project!

I have a confession to make: I get a little teary-eyed when I see a child writing (or receiving) a postcard for the first time. You can almost see the switch going off in their heads when they realize that some sort of magic is going on behind the scenes… they have so many questions! How is this postcard getting across the world? What is the stamp for? How did it land on our mailbox? And when is the next one coming?! :)

So when I saw the pictures that Arlene (aka whodalalee) submitted to our Facebook page… well, you can image the smile on my face! Arlene tells the story of how she and and her friend Evelyn (aka eskae) organized a Postcrossing event in Okanagan Regional Library, as part of the local summer reading program:

My Postcrossing friend Evelyn Skae and I were talking one day about how nice it would be to spread the word about Postcrossing. We had seen schools and teachers doing Postcrossing, so we thought it would be a great idea to see if the local library would be interested in doing something. I went to the library and they were very happy to incorporate Postcrossing into the summer reading program…so Evelyn who works at a print shop made a huge poster, and brochures for the library:

She put a post into the forums asking Postcrossing fans to send postcards to the library. I donated 60 blank postcards to the library so children could answer the postcards. The library set up a wonderful display for one month to let people know about it.

At last, the day for our Postcrossing-summer reading program project came… we arrived half an hour before and waited for the kids to come. It was so wonderful for the children to be able to pick the postcards they wanted, then write the sender a card in return. We had one sender who sent 8 postcards to the library! The children were very enthusiastic and had a wonderful time, there was even a parent who wanted to write a card too. Overall, our project was very successful and so much fun.

I also took many of my favorite postcards to show the variety of postcards we receive and the wonderful stamps on them. It is so exciting to share our passion with others!

We have a few extra postcards that were not answered, so I will be going to another library to see if they would like to continue the project!

Well done Arlene and Evelyn, what an inspiring event! :)

What about you? Have you ever introduced a child to the wonders of mail? Do share!