Penpals Wanted

Lori - posted on 04/20/2012

That is a cool idea!

lori

http://myseedsoffaith.com/

Sarah - posted on 03/30/2012

I have 6 kids (g 8 1/2) (b 6 1/2, b 5, b 3 1/2, b 2 and b 8 mths) I would love to find pen pals for even the older 4-5. The older 3 are school aged but even my younger 2 could start off with just coloring pictures and send them off and I could write a few lines as to what my younger 2 were doing that may have prompted them to colour there picture.Here's my email if you would like your nieces and nephews to become pen pals... mamaof35789@hotmail.com

Angela - posted on 12/10/2011

In this day & age people are wary about giving out addresses for strangers to contact their children - whatever age those children may be.

I had a couple of penpals myself as a child, I agree it's great fun. It's not the only way children can receive mail though. I got a lot of post as a child and only a small portion of it was from my penpals. Children can write to newspapers and journals, they can send away for educational information (often for FREE), they can buy by mail order and they can enter competitions.

Nowadays we have the Internet and it's all so different. Lots of apparently wholesome opportunities might not be entirely "safe".

Penpals are probably best acquired through schools doing exchange programmes with a school in another country.

There are websites that offer penpal services for a small fee:

http://www.friendship-by-mail.com/pen-pa...

http://www.studentsoftheworld.info/

http://www.stachsw.cz/kppc/index.php

http://www.easypenpals.com/read.php3?rub...

My younger sister had a penpal via a Christian children's magazine which she used to get at school.

A very popular penpal method when I was young was the penpal group. Up to 20 people would be penpals together. This starts by a group of people of the same age living in different areas (maybe even different countries) arranging to be in a mutual mailing group. The first person on the list sends a letter to the second - but it's addressed in its content to EVERYONE. The second person reads the letter and writes a letter himself/herself, then he sends BOTH letters to the third person on the list, who adds another letter of his/her own and posts all 3 off to the fourth person in the group. This goes on through everyone on the list until the first person is reached again. That person takes out their own letter, disposes of it and writes a new one. So you receive up to 20 letters at a time, remove your own and write a new one - then send on to the next person on the list. This is a fairly cheap way of having lots of penpals except it's cheaper still if you all live in the same country! But it's another way of having LOTS of penpals but only writing one letter every couple of months.

Hope you get sorted out with penpals for the children in your family, but appealing on a website's Chat forum which ANYONE can join isn't really the ideal medium. Good luck!