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Happy National Coin Week 2011! National Coin Week was started to help people get to know about numismatics…the hobby and study of coins and paper money.
In 1983, the President set aside the third week in April as a time for people to think about coins. Why? Because collecting coins can help you learn about science, history, and important people, places, and events. Besides, lots of people find that collecting coins is just plain fun!
This year's theme is "Blue, Gray, and Greenbacks: Money of the Civil War." What history can you learn from coins? National Coin Week is a good time to find out...and H.I.P. Pocket Change is the perfect place!
Fitting Festivities
In 2011, National Coin Week will run from April 17 to 23. You can bagin to celebrate by reading the stories of these Civil-War-related coins:
- 1936 Battle of Gettysburg commemorative half dollar, the July 2006 Coin of the Month
- Gettysburg National Military Park quarter, the January 2011 Coin of the Month
- Civil War token, the April 2001 Coin of the Month
Plinky starts off this week's festivities with a game from her Games page: Break the Bank. This game has been around H.I.P. Pocket Change for awhile, but it just recently was enlarged and redecorated.
You still get 8 true-or-false questions to answer, but now you never know exactly what those questions will be. You still get to swing a hammer once the piggy bank is fully expanded, but you also get to expand your coin knowledge at the same time!
So click on over to Break the Bank today!
Today, Flip would like to introduce you to the newest game in the America the Beautiful Quarters® Program. It's called 2011: Quick on the Draw.
In this game, you see the design that's on each of the 2011 quarters...but only one piece at a time. The pieces appear as a picture clue, along with a text clue. Your goal is to drag the drawing to the correct national site's coin in as few guesses as you can. For five coins, a score of 5 would be a perfect game. Are you quick on the draw? Find out today!
Goldie directs you to today's pages. The first page houses the 2009 one-cent coin designs. These four designs, about the life of President Abraham Lincoln, are presented in the Coins and Medals section. It's a great source for this year's theme, "Blue, Gray, and Greenbacks," since Lincoln was president during the Civil War.
Reading about these penny designs will get you ready to play Lincoln Words
on the Games page.
Lincoln Words is a word find game with some twists, depending on the level you play.
But on all three levels, you just click and drag to select the word when you find it...that is,
IF you find it! Are you up to the challenge?
Peter is sure glad he invented the Time Machine. Why? Because it will take you on a trip to Boston at the time of the Civil War!
While you're there, you'll learn about money that wasn't really money and lots more about the days of the blue, gray, and greenbacks! Fasten your seat belts!
Today, Bill the Mint Buffalo would like to take you Inside the United States Mint for an online tour! Located in five cities across the country, the facilities of the United States Mint work together to produce the range of coins and medals for which the Mint is responsible. These pages are the place to learn about what the facilities make, where they're located, how long each one has existed, and some of the history behind them.
You'll read that some facilities make spending coins and some make uncirculated coins or proof coins.
You can find out all about these different coin finishes on the Coin Finishes page.
Take these fascinating peeks behind the scenes today!
Bingo, anyone? Yes, says Nero, you can play Bingo online, if you can print the game cards. But you won't find Bingo on the Games page. It was created to be played in classrooms, so it's in the Educators area. You can find it by clicking this Classroom Gadgets link.
While you're there, feel free to play around with the other gadgets.
There's a timer that counts either backward or forward, a decoder wheel for writing and reading secret messages, and a coin toss gadget for making random choices and guessing probability. Once you know where these cool gadgets are, you might want to make sure your teachers know about them too!
Like to color? We thought so. That's why Inspector Collector collected coloring pages for you! ALL 50 quarters from the 50 State Quarters® Program are there for you to download, print, and color as well as the six quarters from the District of Columbia and U.S. Territories Quarters Program, the four pennies from the 2009 Lincoln Bicentennial One Cent Coin Program, and the dollars from the Native American $1 Coin Program and the Presidential $1 Coin Program!
Of course, the other free pages are still there as well: the H.I.P. Pocket Change Pals, circulating coins, Westward Journey Series nickels, and more. With all these pages to color, you can color until you run out of crayons!
But don't worry; then you can go to Cents of Color
or Painters' Studio and color quarters online!