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

Introduce the World

As a student teacher, I was frustrated every time that I heard the statistics about how poor our country does on geography, particularly when it is anywhere but our own country, while students all around the world know geography quite well.

As I teacher, I found that it is still true in my classroom. They are not sure the difference between country, state, continent, and city! When I asked what state they lived in I heard answers such as "Costa Mesa" and "United States." When I introduced the continents, I would sometimes hear that our state was North America as well. I decided that I needed to do something about it.

My class is as busy as the next person's, but I felt this was important enough that it needed to be fitted in somewhere. I decided that I could squeeze it into our opening time. We do the flag, calendar, etc. but we also learn 1 fact a day about a country, with a new country each week.

My board is set up like this:




It is a pocket chart that I mounted on the wall, and I used sentence strips to write the facts. The facts I found from a variety of resources, but mainly searching on the internet for things about the country that I thought the kids would find interesting. Any big world records, largest waterfall type stuff were great, as were customs about birthdays or names. You know what your age group finds interesting, write those down.

On the map I put a pushpin for each country we study so by the end of the year we can look back over all the countries we learned about. While I have my student write the date, I review the 7 continents, and talk about what countries are on them. At the beginning their knowledge is sparse, but by the end of the year, I can name a continent and students are fairly accurate at naming countries found on that continent. (I also ask the opposite way, what continent is China on, etc.)

In addition to the fact of the day, I make available for centers crafts based on that country and I bring food that is typical or native to that country every so often. This year I plan on bringing parents into the geography more by seeing if any parents want to bring food based on where they or their parents immigrated from. I had one family do this last year and it worked out great, and I would like to build on it.

I timed the countries around holidays as much as I could, with China around the time of the Chinese New Year, and Ireland around St. Patrick's day etc.

The kids love it, the parents love it and best of all, they have a better understanding of the world.