I am a huge fan of creative approaches to standards that we know our students will see year, after year. When it comes to writing, we all know that our students will see the same skills spiral and get just a little deeper than they did the year before. This is a good thing, but we want to make sure that our approach to teaching doesn’t get stale, and that we aren’t teaching one standard in a way that our students have seen time and time again!

When it comes to friendly letter writing, I love to incorporate Pen Pals as a regular installment in my classroom! Pen Pal writing can be done with a teacher’s classroom across the country…or with the teacher down the hall! But it’s a unit that you can set up well one time, and then continue for as long as you’re willing to deliver letters!

5 Reasons to Use Pen Pals in the Classroom

1.) Build inter-personal skills

When you incorporate pen pals into your classroom this year, you will be teaching students FAR more than simply a strong writing skill. You will be able to work in so many lessons about communication. Being a good pen pal means that you pay attention to what kinds of things your own pen pal mentioned in their letter, responding to it appropriately, asking follow-up questions, and making connections with your own information! Teaching students how to listen and respond to what their pen pal is writing about is a life skill that they will always keep with them!

2.) Hit the friendly letter writing standards all year long

Friendly letter writing is a unit that comes up near the beginning of the year in most 2nd-3rd grade classrooms, and then it really isn’t repeated again. Teaming up with another classroom in your own building, or a classroom across the country, means that your students can have practice with friendly letter writing all throughout the year, even after your explicit instruction is complete. That’s how students really have a new skill cemented anyways-they learn it really well the first time, and then spiral review it all year long! Setting up a pen pal system makes that easy to do!

3.) Engage students in the writing process

Writing letters to a real, live person is far more engaging than writing letters with no where to send them! I’m super passionate about making sure that the things that we give are students have enough engagement to push them to work a little harder! That’s how we can ensure that our students will grow! So, the benefit of a unit like this is that the students will look forward to working on their letters, which makes them pay closer attention to drafting, editing, revising, and publishing. They know that a peer is going to be looking at it when it’s all done, after all!

4.) Tie in literacy skills

There are so many reading and literacy skills that you can pull into a reoccurring activity like Pen Pal writing. You can teach grammar lessons on parts of speech, and challenge students to make a list of all nouns they work into their letter. You can have students compare and contrast their school to the school that their pen pal goes to. You can challenge students to stick to one theme throughout their next letter, then journal about the main idea! Writing assignments and literacy skill development go hand-in-hand!

5.) Make new friends!

Obviously, the main goal of pairing your students up with pen pals is to foster a new friendship. After this unit is over, maybe your students will continue to write to their pen pals. Maybe, if the pen pal is someone in a different room in your building, they will become friends outside of the school day. As teachers, we are always looking for new ways to encourage kindness and relationships. Pen pals are a great way to do that!

If you would like to purchase a ready-to-go pen pals unit, check out the unit that I have in my TPT store!

SHOP PEN Pals