Pen Friends - Homeschool Activity

 Pen Friends 

One of the challenges that I face sometimes when it comes to homeschooling is to make writing fun for my children. I see it as a need in our family that they are able to hand write well. To get good at something you need to practices.

In the early years of their education I use an Abeka workbook to help me with teaching them the skill of writing and forming letter and words.  Which for us has proven to be useful in our household, and has helped several of my children learn to read. However  once they are reading well they do get bored of it. So I have come up with a number of ways my to help my children learn a love for writing. (that is still a work in progress with some of them)

One of the ways we practise our handwriting skills is with Pen Friends. 

I am also trying to teach my children to BE the type of friend that they would like to HAVE.  All my children love to get letters in the mail. So we are learning that if you would like to get letters in the mail, then you also need to be someone that writes letters to other people.

So this is where pen friends come in handy.

This year I have made a concerted effort to help them grow and develop qualities of a good pen friend.

The first quality would be "someone that writes back".

It can be very discouraging when your children spend the time and effort writing to people that don't write back. So to help avoid some of that, I have gotten several pen friends for my children. They have a least three friends there age, and a few relatives that they can write to. Relatives are good, because they will often pop a card, postcard, or letter in the mail in return.

I have also scheduled a time in my homeschool week for letter writing. For Us Monday is the day! It's the beginning of the week and we get the most done on that day. I also know myself, while I LOVE to fly by the seat of my pants, if I don't make time for things to happen in our crazy, lovely home, sometime they don't get done. Or months have gone by and we suddenly remember that we haven't done, or have missed out on..... So for me I HAVE schedule and make time for things that we REALLY want to do in our lives.

It is the beginning of term 3 for us, so Monday was the day we sat down and made cards for our pen friends. The children had great fun. This time we made and sent one off to every pen friend on there list, because I did get a little slack in my schedule in the last month of last term. So just to bring us all update on everyones pen friends there are lots of letters going out from our house this week.

Having Pen Friends doesn't have to be something that is hard and tiresome, you don't always have to write a big long letter. Often we will be out shopping and find that we card or a postcard that they can easily fill in a send.

For us Aunts, Uncles, and Grandparents are really good value when it comes to getting letters back.

Leave me a Comment

Let me know your pen friend experiences? Or things that you do to help encourage your children to develop there handwriting skills.