Pen Pals Part 2!

Today was my 6th grade afterschool English class, which is usually only 5 students, but I decided to invite the entire 6th grade class to be part of the pen pal letter writting part 2! Boy was that a headache!

I had a class full of 6th graders yelling, "Teacher! Teacher! I want a girl pen pal!" or "Teacher, I want USA boyfriend penpal!" .... "Teacher, I don't understand this letter"..."Teacher, How do you spell____?" I quickly popped in a Chris Tomlin CD that Rachel Shin sent me last year to help calm my soul! Thank goodness I had that little piece of heaven to drown out my crazy, overly excited, and abnormally loud kids! :)

I think the CD calmed them down too, because before I knew it, they were focused on their letters and not asking so many questions! :) This is Brad and John:

This is Erin! She wants to be an English teacher one day! ** Pegg, notice she is holding your sparkly letters! They can't get enough of those darn things!

Anna is one of my best students! :) This made me laugh because she wrote, "Happy Valentine's Day" on the front of her card, since her penpal wrote it to her! I'm pretty sure she has no idea what it means!

And here are the letters... in all their glory! I need to find 4 more kiddos to write a letter, and then they'll be ready to be sent to the US! My kids can't believe their penpals are gonna write them back and they'll get to do this again! Ahh, to be a kid again!

Pen Pals!

My old college friend, Charity Joy, she sent me a package today filled with pen pal letters from her students to mine and tons of delicious treats for my tummy - I'm eating the bag of sourpatch kids as I type!! ... and all kinds of amazing teaching supplies! Thank you friend!

I am sooo excited for my kids to have pen pals, and the teachers who have seen the cards are all saying how lucky our students are to have this opportunity to write back and forth with kids from America! So, Charity, thanks for making this happen!

I immediately laid the cards out on the table, for my 5th grade after school class to chose their penpal! As you can see, Charity's been holding onto these since February! haha

... And then laid out all the fun crafting supplies I have for my kids to make cards! (thanks to Aaron's mom for the fun sparkly rhinestone words! My girls loved using those rhinestones!)

I also wrote some sentences on the board, since let's be honest... If I didn't, their cards wouldn't make ANY SENSE at all! :)

They were so creative with their cards and wanted to make sure they were fully decorated with as many jewels and marker drawings as possible! They took this project VERY seriously! :)
They all made little envelopes for their cards to fit inside! This is Tommy!

This is Andrea!
... and here they all are, 45 minutes after class was finished, still perfecting their pen pal cards! :)

When i told them they could take their letters home from their American pen pals, they were exstatic! It's days like these that make teaching English so much fun! Thank you Charity for your special package and including something for my kids! We may never know how much this fully means to our kids!