In this post, I show how we, as a family, have been encouraging early writing skills by writing each other letters of love and appreciation ❤️
Encouraging Early Writing Skills by Creating a Pretty Letter Writing Kit
We created a writing kit from bits and pieces around the house. We tried to take into consideration our younger girls’ likes and dislikes to create a kit they would be inspired to use.
Letter Writing Kit Contents:
- A Pretty Container: We used a heart shaped whicker box we bought from a charity shop
- A Pot Full of Writing Implements: Coloured pens, pencils and crayons
- A Collection of fun stamps and ink pads
- Decorative Hole Punches
- A Selection of Stickers, Embellishments and Pretend Postage Stamps
- Pretty Note Pages, Blank Cards and Paper with Lots of Envelopes
The main goal with this is to make the writing kit as enticing as possible for encouraging early writing skills!
Encouraging Early Writing Skills by Making Time in their Day Especially for Writing
The children need to be given a special time to write their letters. This applies to any older children or adults taking part.
Ideas Incorporate Letter Writing into your Days
- Make it part of the children’s daily school schedule
- Have a special time in the day, outside of school time, to enjoy writing the letters. For some children, including it within their school will automatically mean it will feel like a chore. To prevent this, create a special time, for example after dinner, when you all sit down and write.
- Use your regular family time to write letters to each other. This could be done on a weekly or monthly basis as an activity done before the main family time event. Or it could be accompanied by hot chocolate and snacks and a whole evening could be dedicated to the writing and reading of each others’ letters.
- You could choose a day, like Sunday, when the children tend to have a quieter, slower day. Writing the letters could be an activity before church, with the promise of reading them together after lunch.
Encouraging Early Writing Skills by Allowing the Children to be Creative (or Not)
Let this time of writing be as relaxed as possible, without the rules and regulations of school. This is not a time to be critical or bring your own preconceived ideas of what a good letter looks like. Let this be a safe place for the children to explore their own writing. Let them decorate their letters as they see fit, even if they put a sky underneath the hills (see below!). Allow them to write as long or as short a letter as they would like. And lastly, allow them to choose the contents of their letter and to express themselves however they would like.
Last, But Not Least, Make Time to Read The Letters Out
This was always everybody’s favourite time! Not just showing off their own letter to their family but also hearing all the words of affirmation and love coming to them from their siblings and parents.
We made a big deal of this time, ensuring that all the family members were present, and that we all joined in.
Look at the joy on Charlotte’s face as she reads a letter from her sister! Our whole family really enjoyed the letter writing and reading aloud time we spent together. Time flies really quickly and I can not tell you how grateful I am for all the lovely memories we have made over the years. Writing positive and life affirming letters is one way in which we built strong and loving family bonds.
For more writing ideas head over to my Language Arts Page. I also love this post from Compassion which outlines ideas for writing to sponsored children in another country.