This week, we wrapped up our study on letter writing. Personally, this is one of my favorite post-Halloween activities because it is so chill yet so fun for the kids. 

One thing that's special about this *almost* post-covid year is that the enthusiasm the kids have for almost every assignment is 10X more than any other year. I did notice that they benefited from walking through doing this activity as a whole group each day rather than doing it fully independently. This helped reinforce the idea of each "part" going on a new line & helped reinforce the different parts of letter writing. 

We started by reading the sweetest story, The Jolly Postman. Then, we explored how to write a letter by looking closely at patterns we noticed in the letters that were in the story. They all had a date, greeting, message, closing, & signature. We wrote a letter to him and turned our letter into an anchor chart to refer to throughout our unit of study.  

Each day during the week, we sharpened our letter writing skills by writing letters to different people. First, everyone picked a classmate's name out of a cup & wrote a letter to that classmate. The second day, after delivering each letter to each classmate, we read the letters and then responded. After delivering this response letter, we add "letter writing" to our fast finisher activity chart so they know they can keep writing back and forth to their friends any time after they finish their work. Then, we wrote a letter to give to someone at home. That night, students were asked to pick someone who they'd like to mail a letter to and write down the address of that person to bring to school the next day. 

Once those addresses arrived, we wrote a letter to someone and mailed it. 

Finally, we paired up with a pen pal from a 5th grade class and wrote a letter to them. They were MOST excited about the idea of connecting with one of the older kids each month and then getting to meet then at the end of the year. It's definitely a favorite monthly activity we do during the school year!