Fun, Educational Kids' Collections
Encourage Your Child to Turn His Treasures Into a Collecting Hobby
Parents can help with their kid's collections by supporting the hobby, helping him find, display and share his treasures, and keeping it real.
Years ago it was baseball cards, stamps and marbles. Today it’s Beanie Babies, Pokemon cards and Disney figurines. Kids’ collections are still educational, creative and fun, and something parents may want to encourage and join in.
The Value of Collecting
Having a collection of anything from shells to coins, porcelain animals to Garfield memorabilia, can teach a child about the value of purchases, money management, wise shopping, and the joy of finding something you’re searching for.
Collecting also can be an educational exercise in classifying objects. Younger children can sort a leaf collection by color or size, for example. Older children can classify a comic book collection by age, type or value.
There’s a creative side to collecting, too. When your child displays his collection, he’s creating an artistic design and coming up with ways to make his collection interesting to view.
What Should Your Child Collect?
Encourage your child to collect something he’ll enjoy looking for, shopping for, or picking up. If he hates nature walks, don’t encourage him to start a rock collection. But if he loves Star Wars, he'll enjoy picking up collectibles from the movie.
If you do a lot of traveling as a family, he may want to collect something that is commonly sold in souvenir shops, such as snow globes, teddy bears or paperweights. He may enjoy collecting something from every city he’s visited.
Kids still actively collect stamps, autographs, collectible cards, rocks, shells, dolls and coins. And the possibilities are now almost endless. Kids collect Hot Wheels or Matchbox cars, bobbleheads, Pez dispensers, every kind of toy animal, and TV show and movie memorabilia.
The Smithsonian Institute’s Kids’ Collecting Web page suggests children build a collection around a subject that interests him.
Displaying Your Child’s Collection
Display your child's collection so he can take them out, play with them, use them, and not have to worry about keeping them in an order. Nothing takes the fun out of collecting more than a “hands off” rule, and there’s nothing sadder than a little girl explaining that her dolls are still in their boxes because they’ll keep their value.
Help your child sort through his collection and come up with creative ways to classify and display it. Keep it child-friendly and not overly stringent. Craft stores have a large selection of display shelves, boxes and ways of displaying your collection.
Help Your Child Show Off His Collection
Encourage your child to share his collection with others. Help him arrange to take it to school for show and tell. Some scout troops have badges for collections, which sometimes include sharing the collection with the rest of the group, explaining it and answering questions about it.
Check with your local library about opportunities for your child’s collection to be displayed in the public display cases for a time.
The most important thing about your child’s collection is that it should be fun for him. Parents should discourage a child from making his collection a competition (“I have more than you.”) or to be overly concerned with the resale value of his collection.
Collecting for kids may be an old-fashioned pastime, but kids who love to gather treasures will naturally want to sort them, display them and share them.
