Posted in Kings Highway Homeschool

This idea came up and it was sooo great I thought I would mention it here.  This year we have decided to add penpaling to our school day.  My objective is to get my children a little more excited about doing their handwriting.  We use Getty-Dubay Italics which is super for Charlotte Mason style short lessons but my kiddos are just not seeing the need to have neat handwriting.  Sometimes we have to create the reason in our childrens minds.  I'm hoping this gives them the incentive and the reason to do so.  

There are loads of places that you can find penpals and lots of yahoo groups.  We are exchanging with a group of families all over the world but to keep my three boys and their pals straight, this is what we will do:

I purchased a 3 brad folder with pockets for each pal.  On the front of the folder we will glue a picture of our pal (if they send one) and we might write the sorts of things that our pal likes all around his or her picture on the front, just to give us writing prompts as we go along.  On the inside, on the pocket we will put our pals name & contact information:  address & email, so it can always easily be found.  

When my child writes a letter we will photocopy it and put it in the brad portion.  When we get a letter, we will file it next, behind the previous letter. This allows us to have a "running" correspondence that the child can read and we can see how long ago we wrote a letter (especially good for the anxious child who can't wait for the reply to come) and it gives us a record of when letters came in (for the reluctant or forgetful child to know when they are past due to respond to a letter).  

Pockets will allow us to store stationary to write on, stickers, postcards, address labels, envelopes and stamps for our correspondance.  It is all together nice and neat and if any of my children decide to have more than one pal to write to, then we will be able to easily keep track of all of them.  

Pretty great idea hun?