Pen Pals

I am SO excited to be writing this blog post today! Kim, over at Activity Tailor, and I teamed up to start a pen pal system for our students! I LOVED her blog post last week about the speech pal's activity she did with her articulation client. We thought it would be wonderful to expand this idea and have students working on other goals write letters to each other. Can you imagine? A letter instead of an e-mail? I don’t even remember the last time I did this, so I’m pretty sure my kids don’t have that experience either.

As SLP's, we work on writing goals ALL the time. I don't know about you, but this is a skill my kids need continued practice in. Why not change it up and have them not only practice writing, but also make new friends? I could see this targeting SO many different goals! It is also a great functional activity for our older kids. I bet many of your kids might not even know how to address an envelope (for real, I’ve tried it once)!

Here’s how it works:

Fill out the matching form here.

You will be providing your name and email address as well as the school/clinic address where letters will be mailed. The only student info we ask for is initials (simply for tracking), age and primary target skill. It is the responsibility of the child’s therapist to help maintain the student’s privacy in all communications!

If you would like to submit an entire group for matching, you can do that too! In this instance you will fill out the form as if the group is one individual/entity and, if at all possible, we will try to match you with another group. Note: If you have a group and want each member to have their own personal match, you will need to fill out a form for each child.

We will do our best to match ages, target skill areas and give you a pen pal that lives in a different geographic area than you do. (We are currently expecting K-Gr. 12 for matches.)

Remember to please fill out a form for EACH student or group you would like matched and make every attempt you can to offer an even number of pen pals so we end up even in the end!

Sign-ups close on February 28, 2015 and you will receive your match by email by March 5, 2015. We ask that you try to post at least 3 letters/postcards to your pen pal no later than May 20, 2015.

Matches will end in May 2015 and you will have the opportunity to sign-up again in August/September for a new match. (If you decide to continue with your original match, you’ll have the opportunity to do so.)

I am SO excited for this and look forward to my kids making new friends!! Please share this idea with other SLP's you know.