To these curious Manhattan third-graders, old stuff is cool.
After a teacher pulled up the floorboards in their classroom closet, 8-year-olds at the Children’s Workshop School dug through the dirt beneath to find a trove of relics buried for decades.
Among discoveries at the East Village school was a faint stick drawing by then-pre-schooler Howard Matis — now a 71-year-old retired scientist in California who was thrilled to learn it was unearthed.
“If I could get a copy I would frame it,” Matis told The Post, adding that all his Stuytown childhood mementos were destroyed in a 1991 fire in Oakland, California. He attended pre-school in the East Village some 65 years ago.
Matis, who earned a Ph.D in physics, now wants to arrange a video-conference with the kids.
Teacher Miriam Sicherman led last week’s “closet archaeology” project in the building erected in 1913.
In prior digs since 2015, her students have turned up hundreds of artifacts — including a Betty Boop button, a 1912 baseball card from the pre-Yankees Highlanders, secret notes about a crush and a petrified hamster. A local museum even curated an exhibit.
The latest dig was also fruitful, with kids shouting, “Look what I found!” again and again.
Devin Salas showed off a “Treasure Hunt” wrapper for a 1-cent gum with a contest puzzle inside.
“It’s fun because we look for stuff that’s really, really old. They don’t sell it any more,” he said.
Ona Mihalic held up a mouse-bitten rent receipt with a blank left for the date: 192–.
“It seems like 100 years ago,” she marveled.
John Lyons, who discovered a Tinkertoy-type wooden wheel, was ecstatic.
“I really love history — especially ancient history,” he said.
Emma Garcia, meanwhile, likes researching the items. “We can see what they did in the old days,” she said.
Despite his unappetizing find — a filthy, twisted wrapper for now-obsolete “Tasty Chips” — Marcus Lee-Heisler mused, “It was probably pretty tasty.”
Other disinterred antiques include a bottle cap from the Penny School Milk Program launched in 1940, a Maltex cereal ad with a rollicking cartoon boy and girl, buttons, whistles, rulers, fountain pen tips and yellowed worksheets.
“It’s amazing to see how every group of kids who participates in an excavation finds it absolutely fascinating,” Sicherman said.
“It’s also emotionally rewarding for them to find and hold objects that were held by children who are now the age of grandma and grandpa.”
