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- With the United States Mint producing many new coin designs, organize a "New Coin Swap" to take place at a local meeting place. With the permission of their parents/guardians, invite children to come with their families and bring their spare change (extra versions of the same coin designs) to trade for ones that they have been searching for! Think about hanging identifying signs that say things like "1999 Quarter designs: Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut" or "Peace Medal nickels" to help the children know where they can go to trade for their desired coins. Consider taking this opportunity to teach children about the different locations where circulating U.S. coins are minted.
- With cooperation from parents, think about hosting a kid collector's club. Young collectors often can learn a great deal from older collectors. However, when they're first starting their collections, children may also be intimidated by these pros. Give the children some added confidence by allowing them to take turns running meetings or presenting different topics of discussion. Consider encouraging the kids to work with each other on reserching and discussing their coins. From time to time, invite an older guest or two to speak to the children about different coin related topics.
- Work with parents to develop a mentoring program within your coin club. With appropriate supervision, pair each child up with a more experienced collector and allow them to work on research and projects together!
- Do you live within driving distance to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania or Denver, Colorado? Bring the minting process to life for your young collectors. Consider requesting a tour of either of these United States Mint facilities. Visit "The Real Tour of the Mint" to learn how to arrange for a tour.
- What do your young club members know about collecting? You may want to invite them to show their knowledge by having them each prepare a few trivia questions for the group. You might start each meeting by allowing one member to read one question to the group. As a treat you could provide small prizes for the collectors who are the first to correctly answer each week's question.
- Kids love it when adults make mistakes. With that in mind, you could host an error coin celebration! If appropriate, invite your coin club members to bring and share error coins at your next meeting. You may wish to ask some of the more experienced collectors to explain what may have happened at the mints for those errors to have occurred. For refreshments a fun idea would be to serve nearly circular cookies (crop them before you bake them)!
- Have you ever considered hosting a coin scavenger hunt? If you wanted to try such an event, one way to do so would be to purchase some inexpensive coins from your local coin shop (often coin shops will sell these in bulk quantities) and place them in flips. Before your next coin club meeting, you could disperse these coins around the room in specific locations, and then create clues that will help identify where these coins are hidden. Once all the club members have gathered, you might wish to place them into two teams. You could give each team a different pack of 5-10 clues and allow them to search for the coins in its pack. The team who has found all of their coins first will be the winners. Consider allowing each member of the winning team to select and keep a coin from the scavenger hunt. Assistance from parents/guardians would be extremely beneficial when conducting this type of activity.
- If your coin club specializes in world coins, a fun idea might be to host an international dinner where foods and coins of different nations can be presented and discussed. With appropriate supervision, your coin club could invite its younger members to create a display about their most interesting foreign coin(s) and arrange the displays according to continents. Consider giving a prize for the best display from each continent.
- Similar to a spelling bee, have you ever thought of organizing a "What's in a coin?" trivia competition amongst your young coin club members or even between your club and another in the area? You could create a battery of questions for the competitors and let all of your young collectors compete. You might want to put the word out to your community about this event and see if you can get a local coin shop to sponsor the prizes for the competition.
- With appropriate parental supervision, you may wish to arrange to attend local and national coin conventions as a group. Think about encouraging your young collectors to create special exhibits to display at these conventions. While at the conventions, you may want to suggest that your club's collectors examine the displays of other children. This would provide a good dicussion topic for your next coin club meeting; what good ideas did the children notice while looking at the other displays?
