Pen Pals

This post, as you can see from the title, is about Pen Pals. Now I am fully aware that pen pals are an old idea. I found on one of the websites that I will link to below, that just their organization has been around since 1936. So this is absolutely nothing new.

However, being aware of an opportunity is not the same as taking it. The first year I did pen pals was last year, and I plan on doing it again this year. My class became pen pals with a class in Hungary.

My primary goals were to teach them about another culture, and to teach them how to write a letter. I knew that having pen pals would help me accomplish both goals in a fun way. What I didn't expect were the results.

My class looked forward to every letter, and any day that the package arrived for us was a great day. When I told the students they could keep the letter from their pen pal, they were in awe. They treated this letter from another country as a priceless jewel, and I was the amazing teacher that let them keep it. I hoped they would be excited, but this kind of enthusiasm was unexpected. Unfortunately, I also didn't anticipate the complete and utter disappointment when a few of my students did not receive the last letter because their pen pals no longer attended the school. They had truly become attached, and the loss of it was a big one. Both show the value that my class placed on the experience.

I was hoping on teaching them about how different our culture was from Hungary's culture, but what both my class and I learned instead is that they are not so very different from us after all. Many of the TV shows that my kids are familiar with, they are too. My kids would ask if they knew what soccer was, and the kids in Hungary said that it was one of their favorite games. Many of my students asked me at the end of the year if they could keep writing to their pen pal, and fortunately, because of smart thinking on the part of the other teacher, they could, because the kids included their home address in that last letter. I hope that they do continue the friendships started in my class.

If you haven't become brave enough to do this before, I encourage you to try it. The rewards are huge, and the cost is small. Partly because my pen pals were in Hungary, we only were able to exchange letters every other month or so, and that made it easy to fit into my daily schedule. It only cost me 6 dollars or so every time I shipped a packet of letters, and since I was only doing it every other month, it was a small price to pay for my students' happiness.

Here are two links that you can get started with, but you can also search google for pen pals and find lots more.

http://www.theteacherscorner.net/penpals/index.php

http://www.pen-pal.com/index.php