A.J Baker Students Pen Pal Project

Sunday, 8 March 2015 07:09

A.J Baker Public School and H.B Beal Secondary School exchanged traditional handwritten letters over the course of 4 months.

OXFORD COUNTY - Grade 3 and 4 students at A.J Baker Public School in Kintore learned the old fashioned way of communicating long distance with friends. The A.J Baker students were partnered with a grade 10 student from H.B Beal secondary school in London as part of a pen pal project organized by two teachers; one from Beal the other from A.J Baker. Over the course of four months from September 2014 to December students corresponded by writing handwritten letters to each other. "Who doesn't love receiving a piece of mail?" said Co-coordinator of the project and A.J Baker Public school teacher Heather McPhail. According to McPhail students were thrilled when the letters from their big buddies were received in the 'mail.'

"We had sent our letters off and I thought oh great I've got these letters and I'm going to hand them out and we will have a quiet independent writing period...and it was like Christmas time they were jumping up and down and they were running and the principal came in and they were like, "Look what my pen pal wrote to me" and they were so excited to get that piece of writing."

The project culminated in January when students had the chance to meet their pen pals in-person.

Although McPhail says the purpose of the project was to promote writing skills and character development, it became much more than that. Friendships were developed and the big buddies took on a mentorship role with the younger students. In one case an H.B Beal student was not attending class regularly and found out about the project.

"There was a student who didn't always come to class and when he found out about this program and Mrs. Wilkin (H.B Beal teacher) said 'you know if you write to somebody you're going to have to be responsible for writing them back when they write you a letter' and he started coming to class more frequently because of this project."