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Celebrate National Postage Stamp Day

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Another American holiday that’s celebrated on July 1 is National Postage Stamp Day. It commemorates the issuance of the first U.S. postage stamp, the Two-Cent Blue, on July 1, 1847. The stamp was designed by James B. Longacre and featured a portrait of Benjamin Franklin.

The Two-Cent Blue is one of the most famous postage stamps, but it wasn’t the first. The first adhesive postage stamp, the Penny Black, was issued in the United Kingdom on May 1, 1840. The Penny Black was designed by Rowland Hill, a British schoolmaster who is credited with inventing the postage stamp. Hill’s idea was to create a system where mailers would prepay postage, rather than having the recipient pay for it upon delivery. This system made mail more affordable and efficient, and it quickly caught on around the world.

In the early days, postage stamps were made of paper and were not perforated. This made them difficult to use, as they had to be cut by hand. In 1854, the first perforated stamps were issued in Switzerland. Perforation made it much easier to use stamps, and it quickly became the standard.

If you want to celebrate National Postage Stamp Day (whether you live in the United States or not) you can:

  • visit your local post office, looks at and buy some stamps
  • write a letter or card and mail it
  • design your own stamp with a blank stamp coloring page (like this one from Eduprints)
  • color in stamp coloring pages — Mr. Nussbaum has a collection of the 50 states stamp coloring pages, which are just so cute!
  • start a postage stamp collection or check out the collection of the US Postal Museum
  • learn some stamp facts — for example, did you know the most expensive postage stamp ever sold was a British Guiana 1c Magenta, which sold for $9.5 million in 2014?
  • do some pretend play post office play — little kids love putting “stamps” on envelopes and writing “letters”

[Photo via Kenmore Stamp]

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Fun Halloween Worksheets for Kids

After sharing some witch themed math activities, I found a bunch more fun printable worksheets with a Halloween theme for kids to try, so let’s take a look at some more low-prep Halloween learning fun. 

Give kids practice measuring bats, spiders, ghosts and more with these printables from What I Have Learned Teaching. Kids can use a ruler, unit cubes or even little Halloween themed erasers to measure and track the size of the images. 

Practice symmetry by drawing half a haunted house, ghost, skull or other simple images with this activity from Printables Hub. 

I always love a good roll and draw activity, too, so check out this roll and draw a ghost activity (which has printable instructions) from Finding Myself Young.

Missy Printable Design has a cute set of Halloween worksheets for preschool, including tracing the letter H and a haunted house, spider counting, number tracing, sequencing, coloring pages and more. 

The Halloween themed printables from The Artisan Life are meant to be playdough mats, and you can definitely use them for that to make the shape and trace the letters. But you could also use pipe cleaners or Wikki Stix, or line up buttons or anything else on them. 

Older kids will enjoy this witch’s brew logic puzzle from Education.com. The witch has made different potions with different colors that do different things, and using the clues you can figure out which one is which. (Don’t worry; there’s an answer key included if you can’t figure it out on your own!)

Another fun puzzle is this decoder activity from Crafting Cheerfully. The holiday icons each represent a letter, and kids can use the decoder to answer the riddle. This isn’t a free resource (and the link in the post is broken but you can find it here) but it includes 20 riddles and an editable file so you can make up your own codes to decipher. 

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