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! 

 

Handwritten letters are one of my favorite things in the entire world. So, teaching my students to write letters is such fun - plus, it's a quick little unit so it's perfect to do right before Thanksgiving Break.

This year, I have a precious little boy in my class who often says things that just make my day! He is so sweet, earnest, adorable, and just plain funny! Before I get to the part of the story with him in it - I want to remember the "lightbulb moment" I had and some background that led up to this epiphany. 

Now, in the past at the end of this unit I've always asked the first graders who they want to mail a letter to. At first, I would just tell them to bring a stamped & addressed letter to school later that week so we could finish our project. Of course, I noticed a lot of the letters were written by parents and such. Which is totally fine! But I wanted the students to do it and I figured if I wanted them to learn it a certain way, I should be the one to teach them. Plus, it wouldn't always come back quickly because not every has stamps or envelope anymore, yada yada. 

So then, I started e-mailing their parents for the address (since it's typically a relative or friend). Then, I print each one out for them. Of course I had to take some time for this because I had to separate the return address from the mailing address and next thing you know, prepping this activity would take me 2 hours...and that's a problem...

So as they returned these papers and the first graders finished the letters they had been writing in class, I started to pull the students in small groups to address their envelopes. 

Okay - so finally it's one of my sweet first graders turns. He's sitting down, addressing his envelope. After about each line in the envelope he proceeds to put his pencil down and shake his hand out - because "oh man, it's just such hard work." Then, he finished addressing the envelope and I tell him "Good job! Now flip the envelope over, put your letter in it, lick the envelope & you're finished!" He just looks right at me and says "Oh, I've heard about this part." Of course I'm dying laughing in my head...you've heard about this? Like what, all the kids are meeting together to talk about it at recess? So I say "You've heard about this?" and he goes "yes, it's gross." So I respond "it's not that bad, just stuff it, lick it & you're good to go." He proceeds to stuff the envelope and then he puts it face down on the table (so the licking side is facing him) and fear factor style - puts his hands on each side of the envelope on the table and gives a big sigh. I say "It's okay, lick it." And he does. Then, I say "Well, how was it?!" He sweetly and very sarcastically responds: "MMMM, delicious." 

With all the new technology and advancements, there are so many things kids don't know about anymore or get to experience - like knowing what a VCR is (literally, one of my strongest readers paused for about 5 minutes when she came to this word because she had no clue what it was, let alone said), having chalkboards in schools, licking a stamp, etc. It's so fun to be able to provide them with a little bit of "old-school" experiences.