Whole new generation – Postcards

This year I’ve managed to encourage many of my Grade 3-6 teachers to take part in the Global Read Aloud. I’ll save my comments on the good and bad of that for another post. This year for the first time, we’re also taking part in the postcard exchange.  Basically you put your school / class name and address onto a spreadsheet and promise to send everyone else on the list a postcard in exchange for receiving postcards from them.

So far so simple. Except the logistics. Dashing off to the post office to queue up for 60 international postage stamps. Gosh, that’s pricy, there goes bits of my budget. Convincing teachers to let their kids use a huge chunk of their library lesson to write postcards. Dredging out a tutorial to remind myself how to do a mail merge from a google sheets list. Oh gosh, yes, the data on the excel sheet has to be redone so it’s the right format. Purchase labels in the right size. Fiddle around with printing. Convince one teacher to buy a bunch of postcards and convince marketing to give us the balance in school cards. That was all the backend stuff.

And then it was hilarious. Do you know that most 10 year olds have never written a postcard? Ever. Or received one. Do you know that most 10 year olds have never ever licked a stamp? Don’t know where to write the address / write the message. And if it wasn’t for the picture of where to put the stamp they’d not know where to put it.  So who is buying postcards, and will they soon go the way of CD’s and DVD’s and all that physical stuff in our lives?