The Pen Pal Project

Hi again!  This is Linda Phillips from Kinder Doodles.  Isn't the year just flying by?  It's hard to believe that we are in our fourth quarter already!  I am amazed at how much my little cuties have grown since we first met way back in August.  One of the areas in which they have grown by leaps and bounds is their writing.  It just didn't seem possible at the beginning of the school year that the Kinders would be able to write like they do when they are getting ready to leave me.  But. to my delight, they did!  To celebrate great writing & to encourage reluctant writers my daughter (who teaches kindergarten in a neighboring district) and I decided to have our students write pen pal letters to each other.  Because she has 28 students and I have 18, we are just writing to the other class & not pairing up students with a specific pal. 

 

To begin our letter writing, we brainstorm a little on what we could write to our pen pals.  Once we have a list of ideas in our heads, we use a list page from one of Mrs. Wills' wonderful Writing Stations sets. 
 

 

 

Brainstorming ideas and writing our lists took one class period.  In this set of letters we wanted to tell our pen pals what we do at our school.  Jump Rope for Heart was a big event that week, so it was a natural topic for the kiddos to write about.

 

 

Here are a few examples of out letters.  They represent a variety of ability levels.  I'm pretty excited about how well everyone did.  Even my reluctant writers got into their letters! 

 

 

The first two letters are two pages long.

 

 Page 1 above, page 2 below.

  Page 1 above, page 2 below.

 

 

 

Not only has this Pen Pal Project helped my little cuties to learn about letter writing, it has really shown me the importance of giving students a fun and interesting reason for writing.  They are sooo excited to write letters to their pen pals!  If you are interested in writing your own pen pal letters, you can get a copy of this writing paper in my TpT store.  Click HERE to get it for free!

 

PS Here are a few more links for you.  :-)

 

My blog: Kinder Doodles,  my Kinder Doodles Facebook page, and my daughter's blog: Kinder Cakes.

 

Thanks for reading!