Cards for my students

[bnorth]

Originally Posted by Snowman5520

"Snow jobbed". That's really original. I have NEVER heard anything similar poking fun of my last name.

"Scam". Seriously? So I give my REAL name, my place of employment, my Principal's name......and you think that all points to a SCAM. Guess you got me......I joined a national board that is the best I have ever seen and ran a scam using my REAL name and place of employment to get a bunch of 1990 Donruss commons and penny sleeves. Seriously?

Any yes, Thank You letters are planned from my kids.

With that being said, my class met 3 days last week and we will meet for the 4th time today. Last week, I gauged interest in the hobby and what previous knowledge kids had about collecting. I then got an idea of what players or teams each student would be interested in collecting.

After that, we started delving in to the history of baseball cards. We looked at the late 1880's issues and worked up to the T cards of the early 1900's. Of course, we talked about the T206 Wagner and even viewed a 15 minute documentary (OTL on ESPN) about the fake Wagner floating around today. I am a history teacher, so we even tied in card collecting to pop culture and the roaring 20's. I plan on moving into the 30-40's this week and using the rest of January and early February to get to how baseball cards have evolved to present-day. I will do the same for Football and Basketball cards in February.

As for the uses of your donations, we will have one day a week where I make up goody bags and students will vie for the ones they want. We will have various ways of seeing who gets what. We will also use them in learning about condition and especially proper storage. A few kids have brought in their cards and I cringe when I see how they store them. There really isn't a cross-curricular requirement for the class as far as teaching math skills using statistics or even the geography of where players were born, but I'm still going to include an "academic" lesson from time to time.

I am also really hoping to have time to allow kids to trade cards. That teaches social and bargaining skills and even brings the process of economics into the class.

All I know is I was so pumped to see how interested they were when we started looking at pictures of cards on the LCD projector. They were amazed with the story of the Wagner, and I am confident they will love the story about the 52 Topps 3rd series and other interesting tidbits about our wonderful hobby.

It is great to see someone doing this. Thank you for your good work.

I have given around 40,000 junk era cards to a friend that teaches at a local Hutterite Colony and the kids there love them. I got the idea from this forum about 2 years ago. He lets the kids play with them when ever they have free time at school because they have nothing else.