Curriculum Guides

Critical Thinking Skills through Vatican City Stamps

Designed to support a Catholic school curriculum, this guide to the Postal Museum’s Vatican City stamp collection provides an introduction to visual resources that illustrate papal history, biblical stories, and saints. Other teachers may be inspired to use similar thinking strategies on stamps from any country around the world.

Celebrating People with Disabilities through Stamps

Many states and districts are adding disability studies to education requirements. Reference this guide to get ideas and guidelines for best practices in teaching about the history and activism of people who have disabilities.

Design It! Student Stamps for America

A set of units in this interdisciplinary curriculum brings together history and visual arts through stamps. Students will learn about the history of stamps, the rules for selecting a subject, how to design a stamp, and then apply artistic skills in designing their own stamp!

Handle With Care! A Postal Engineering and Design Challenge

From creating efficient and safer systems to getting the mail to your doorstep, problem solving has always been a part of the work of the Postal Service. This lesson plan promotes STEAM skills as students practice problem solving through engineering.

Grade Level: Grades 5-8
Type of resource: Lesson Plan
Topics: Engineering, postal operations, problem solving, people, design thinking

Victory Mail: Elementary

These activities provide a creative way to teach writing skills - letter writing for elementary and middle school - about World War II. In conjunction with the National Postal Museum’s online exhibition, Victory Mail, as well as textbooks and other resources already in use in the classroom, these materials will help students understand aspects of patriotism during wartime, and the significance of personal correspondence by focusing on the efforts made by civilians at home during the war. Students will likely find learning about V-Mail an interesting way to engage in writing and social studies lessons.