February 2020 Part 6: Preschool Post Office Field Trip

 In February, Gabe had his preschool Field Trip to the Post Office in American Fork. I don't really love Preschool Field trips--they kind of interrupt my 2 hours of me-time, but the Post Office one is pretty fascinating, even if this was my third time going. As adults, we only get to see the counter side of the Post Office and the times they mess up. I think every adult should be required to get a tour of the Post Office so that we can all better appreciate just how well they DO get our mail to us, especially considering all that our mail has to go through to get to us. It's really quite fascinating!

Each kid prepared for the trip by creating a piece of mail for themselves. 

We learn about post office boxes and how important it is to actually collect your mail from them if you have one. We got to see what the other side of these boxes looks like. 

We got to see the dock where incoming mail comes. It arrives during the night and postal workers  arrive really early--by 4 or 5 am to start sorting mail. It may have even been 3 am. These workers sort all the incoming mail into the different routes. Then, the route workers take their pile and sort it in order of their route. Once all the packages and envelopes are all sorted and in order, they load them into their trucks. Miss Angela's mom is one of the route drivers at the A.F Post Office, and she let all the kids climb through her truck just before she got it all loaded. 

Then the kids got to see where letters go if you drop them off at the mailbox in the post office. They come down these shoots and into this big bin. 

Here's one of their letters coming down the shoot and landing in the bin. 

Here they all are on one of the sorting carts. 

We learned about the proper way of forwarding a letter if someone sends you the wrong letter. We were reminded not to try and send coins or other hard objects through a regular envelope. We also learned about how incredibly efficient the U.S. Postal Service is at handling letters/post cards. It's all incredibly fascinating. There's a ton of work getting our letters from point A to point B. Thanks for an amazing tour, American Fork branch of the U.S. Postal Service!