Need some ideas, Please!

Well, it's coming up time for me to be doing another coin club *educational* program. I've been thinking about doing one called "Finding a New Direction". Thinking about how to posit this for about a 15 minute talk.

So down to brass tacks, for a coin club, if you were doing one with that subject what might you think about highlighting?

Any nice comments are really welcome.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

Big fan of getting kids into coins. Guess that would be my suggestion. Use your imagination to find a way to spark the interest and then mentor kids in this wonderful hobby.

 

How to research when a new area of interest is decided upon.
Are base metals sufficient or is silver and gold the preference.
A visual display of coinage available in said genre, ( Numista and VCoins are good for this).
Obtaining average costs involved by looking at realised sales in E-bay or auction results.

 

Finding a new direction in collecting can cover a lot of territory... why not start with coin collecting isn't just filling holes in an album.

Then go into the many areas of collecting. Errors,variety, exonuma,Ancients etc...etc... just to offer them choices..... use hooks like history ...geography... etc... to spark their interest even more... show them coins from BC to present......date.

 

I have done several presentations at my local coin club. All of them have been on World coins. I've always got favorable responses since 90% of the topics discussed are about U.S. coins. They love to hear about something new instead of the same old same old. That would cover a "new direction".

 

I know you have always been a animal lover since I first met you..there's plenty of animals on coins... you can go in that that direction.

 

Bacon vs. Breakfast Sausage

 

Bacon... 4 pcs every morning...

Dont leave out SCRAPPLE lips and hoofs yum

 

I have a club meeting this week and it is a small club in a small town. Many of the members are not comfortable with grading coins. I was thinking about showing the PCGS photograde app and maybe talk about other websites that help collectors determine grades. Regards.

 

Bacon

 

That's a really cool idea. I know for myself that learning to grade (I focused on the Unc grades and AU ones) was a very rewarding experience. I'm still not very good with the normal Unc grades for actual grading but I like that I have resources with books (and the app if necessary) to figure out what is what on a particular coin.

One of the biggest takeaways I learned from focusing on the Uncirculated Grades was that if I saw a coin in a shop for instance and it said "BU", that by looking at it, I had learned to spot small bits of wear which would make it a slider and it would really possibly only be AU. I thought that was pretty cool, as it was focusing on the factors that go into a coin.

 

How about a presentation on the market scams out there. Things like First Release and First Strike have nothing to do with the actual coin and all collectors should be well aware of them. There are enough issues in this category to make up an educational presentation.

 

The first thing I thought of in reading your phrase "Finding a New Direction" was my own journey in this hobby. As a teen, hoarding and accumulating everything I could get my hands on. The pause in my hobby while I chased girls, cars, sports, etc. Getting back into it and refining what I wanted in my collection, and letting go of the previous "hoard". Moving into fewer coin purchases of much higher quality, with an end goal in mind (date set of buffalo nickels in MS, short set of walkers in MS, type set of NGC/PCGS graded coins, etc.).

 

That's a direction I never thought of. You are so correct. Reminds me of the something mint (I won't name and shame it here) that had collectable 'plates'. So much money went into those by some people and they never got any real value out of it.

 

My brain is numb right now, but good luck and let us know what you come up with.

 

Maybe a look at some of the fake slabbed coins that are showing up in NGC and PCGS plastic with many cert numbers provided.
I think that Jack young, has posted plenty on this subject that you could cover at least 15 minutes.

 

The emergence of CAC in the U.S. coin market prompted me to get involved with British coins and later Roman imperial pieces. I am as much into the history of each ruler as I am the coins.

I did decide to venture into the Proof coins from 1936 to 1942. There is a great book by Roger Burdette on the topic. That had me going to many tables at three or four winter FUN shows to find the coins.

 

Well, I've decided to go with the title "New Directions" and basically do a smorgsebord of things. I am going to bring my Jefferson Nickel collection (the one I have in an older Capitol album and which is almost filled with nickels from change and roll hunting going up to 1964, my Japanese coins, even the one I bought from @lordmarcovan, a number of my ancients, my Brazilian ones with holes in it (I have 5, and they came with my mother and grandmother in the 1920s when they immigrated to the US from there, evidently they were part of a bracelet at one point), My Icelandic Kingdom collection, and a couple other things.

Basically I am going to start off saying that where you start off in coin collecting is not the only thing to stay with, to start exploring other parts of numismatics and give reasons why I got into the various ones I did. People can find a lot to love in looking for other things than what just got them started in the hobby. Because for a long time, my main focus was modern US coins (1965 on dimes, nickels, quarters mainly).

For example the earlier Jefferson nickel collection was because I saw an unusual nice book to hold them and I was coin hunting. The bracelet coins are because they are part of family history, the Japanese ones are because I went to Japan a couple times, liked the coinage and how they really use it and then got a bit historical on finding out about the coins, and the Icelandic Kingdom collection came about because I was looking for coins to photograph and the ones used in this time were really good for that, not too elaborate in design but not too bland to me, and the various ancients came about in other ways.

Coins are a lot of things and 'New Directions' are sometimes found by thinking about what the coin is or means to you or what time period or place or thing you want to do with it comes about.

 

Exonumia.

Just sayin . . .

Z