Wild About Writing Wednesday and a GREAT Giveaway!

This week's writing tip is all about using postcards in the classroom and it comes from the book Teaching Real-Life Writing to Young Learners.

Postcards are an easy and fast way to get your students thinking about writing to friends, classmates, and family members. They are short and easy to manage when trying to get your youngest writers to send a message to someone. They also bring about a great sense of accomplishment for your students because they involve writing for a purpose and they go through the mail whether it is class mail, school mail, or the real mail. 


Introduce postcard writing by discussing with students reasons why people write postcards. Create a circle map or other graphic organizer to show all of the reasons your students share. Have students share stories about times they have sent or received a postcard. Younger students may not be familiar with postcards so introducing postcard writing with the literature links below or by showing real examples of postcards is a good way to get started. 


Great books that will inspire postcard writing...

Introduce postcard writing by modeling the process. Create an over-sized "postcard" to send to someone or another class in the school. Draw students attention to the fact that when you write postcards you only write a short message. If you introduce postcard writing with the book Arthur Goes to Camp have students see what all they can figure out and gain from Arthur's short messages. For example, how Arthur might be feeling or what he might be thinking about what he is writing about. For your youngest writers you will have to model, model, model before turning them loose to write their own postcards. 

My favorite way to use postcards in the classroom is with Poco & Pop's Monthly Classroom Stationery Set. 

If you are not familiar with Poco & Pop then you must check them out! I love all of Susan's stuff!! 

The stationery set contains 12 large colored stamps for display in the writing center and 26 black line masters so you can run off as much stationery as you need. There are 2 formats for each month or celebration- a postcard and a fold-over version. 

I wish I had pictures from my own classroom to share, but since I can't find any right now I used some from the Poco & Pop site.  My class has used the stationery to write letters to each other and to family members. They absolutely love writing to each other and being able to switch the postcards, stamps, and stationery out each month keeps them engaged all year long! 

Check out our fun mailbox below made by my BFF Amanda!! The kids put their postcards in the mailbox when they are ready to send them to their friends. 

And now for the MOST IMPORTANT and BEST news in this post... Susan has agreed to giveaway a set of the writing stationery to one lucky blog follower!! Woohoo!! 

To enter to win the Poco & Pop Monthly Classroom Stationery Set:

1) Check out the Poco & Pop website. 

2) "Like" Poco & Pop on Facebook. 

3) Follow Chalk Talk. 

4) Add Chalk Talk to your blog roll if you have a blog. 

5) Post about the giveaway if you have a blog. 

6) Like Chalk Talk on Facebook. 

You can leave a single entry for all of the requirements or a separate entry for each. It is up to you! The giveaway ends Next Friday, July 27th at midnight. Good luck everyone!