Pen Pals: What We’re Doing

Matt (and me a little bit) will be homeschooling our boys for at least the first half of our Family Gap Year. And having pen pals will be part of the experience!

Back in the Family Gap Year 1.0 plan, we were going to homeschool for an entire year. But then COVID happened and mandatory homeschooling happened and we realized we aren’t so much a homeschooling family. And while we were fine doing it for one year, two years seemed like pushing it.

Honestly, it’s not that we aren’t a homeschooling family, per se. We just aren’t a “let’s spend 24 hours a day, 7 days a week together” kind of family.

But now our Family Gap Year 2.0 still doesn’t exactly make it easy to put our children in school. We are moving around a lot for the first half of the year. So we will attempt to homeschool our children again for at least the first half of the school year, if not the entire school year.

At one point, one of our boys mentioned wanting pen pals, and we decided that it would be cool to write to pen pals all year long and then meet up with them when we land in New Zealand in 2023. I got to work with emailing the enrollment coordinator at a Montessori school in New Zealand. I wrote this letter and asked the enrollment coordinator to please forward it to any family who might be interested.

And we got a response! So now we are all set to have pen pals who are also brothers. And each brother is just one year older than each of my children.

Henry and Tate will each have a 3-ring binder with various dividers and paper types in it. We will build a portfolio of our school work across the year. Their binders will also have paper for letter writing. Tate has dysgraphia, so I bought him this special paper to try out.

I also cut out magazine pages so we could make our own envelopes (I’ll be writing letters, too). I opened up a legal-sized enveloped and used the shape to approximate a template on cardboard from a cereal box. We will also bring a glue stick, tape, and labels for the addresses. You can see my sample envelope in the photo above.

Whenever I’m preparing activities for kids, I’m conscious about who is doing the majority of the thinking and the work. So far, it has been me! My children totally could’ve emailed the school looking for pen pals and they could have made their own envelope template. But I’m having to make decisions about where to engage them and when. I know that writing the actual letters will be a lot of work for them, as will making the actual envelopes. So I ended up deciding that it made sense for me to get everything ready.

I did, however, work on the project at the counter with them while they were working on their own projects (i.e., claymation). So I was able to show them what I was doing and how.

We’ll see what happens. This activity could totally fall flat on its face. It might end up feeling like teeth pulling to get them to write their letters! In my attempt to “teach” them how to develop and organize ideas, as well as how to revise and edit, they might lose their zest for this project.

I’ll update you throughout the year about how it goes!