Education Digital Downloads: Postcards from around the world Get 20% OFF across the Scholastic Shop

With the children seated comfortably, initiate a discussion about holidays, both in the UK and abroad. (Take care to include those who may spend their holidays at home.) Ask a range of questions about how the children travelled, their favourite holiday activities and the foods that they enjoyed.

Talk about how they kept in touch with people at home – by mobile, email, text message, and so on. Find out if any of the children have ever written or received a postcard. Present the children with the old holiday postcards. Do they know why people send postcards? Perhaps it is to show where they went on holiday, to remember people at home, or to say how much they enjoyed themselves.

Point out that there isn’t room to write much on a postcard, so the trick is to use as few words as possible. Try to work out where the postcards are written from. (The Victoria Pier in Cowes, the Pyramids of Giza, the Eiffel Tower and the Sydney Opera House.) Find their locations on the globe and establish the countries in which they are situated. Ask questions such as, Which is the only one from Britain? Which postcard was sent from the oldest structure?

Discuss which of the four places the children would most like to visit, making a simple graph of their answers on the whiteboard. Now examine the postcards individually. Tell the children that the Victoria Pier was built in Edwardian times, and was basically a landing stage for boats with a pavilion at its head.

Read what Henry has written on the back of his postcard and identify the clues that reveal he wrote it a long time ago.

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