In an earlier post I mentioned how I took my 6 year old son to a coin show to garner some interest in collecting coins and it was a success. He picked out his own coins, a varied mix of world coins and a token, and was extremely proud of his handy work.
Now that I had his interest, the next hard step was to begin the education. This is not as easy as it sounds. He just finished kindergarten so his skills are pretty limited so before we introduced the finer aspects of coins we had to hone some basic skills (like reading).
The first thing I had to teach him was the concept time. He had a very good concept of the present and future but the past (beyond a year) seemed like numbers to him and not years to him. To get over this, we started with the current year (2008) and we counted backwards to 1998 by which time he understood the concept of past years and how old 1912 vs. 2002 is.
The next step was teaching a little geography. Again we are dealing with a kindergartener so the concepts of continents, countries, states, and cities are confusing. Luckily I have a 5ft x 6ft world map that we could layout on the floor. I would sound out the words and he would find the country on the map and then place the coin on the map.
The last thing I worked on with him was asking what he liked about each coin. Sometimes he just liked how the letters on a reverse were displayed and others were for their designs. I did this for two reasons.
The first reason was to figure out what he would like to collect and the second reason was to get him interested in a specific series or collecting habit. As it turns out, he likes variety and wants different types (like father like son) but he also wants to specialize in one series. At the coin show he picked up an old Pennsylvania bus token and it turns out he is just fascinated by it. So in addition to a type set, he wants to buy as many transit tokens he can get.
I'll be honest, this caught me off-guard as I have never collected tokens so it looks like I'll need to get educated on the subject pronto so he or I do not make any mistakes. Personally I can't complain, I hoped my son would get into collecting and he did. It was just a little different than Dad and that's probably a good thing :)