There was a time before Facebook
and Flickr when people mailed picture postcards to friends and family as they
traveled on vacation. They were often called “penny postcards” because the stamp
cost just a penny. Here is one from Washington, D.C. in which the writer -
Celinda, my grandmother - tells of voting and attending a luncheon with other Daughters of the American Revolution from Ohio. You’ll also notice that
this 1935 postcard bears an address with just a name and a town!
Why not make this the summer to
bring back the pleasure of picture postcards and summer letters? A dear friend
of mine who goes to Minnesota to fish every summer often writes four to six
page letters by hand; they can’t be read on the fly as we do with emails and Facebook
posts. They must be savored, as I visualize the family members or fishing
adventures he describes.
Debbie Levy
devotes her award-winning book, The Year of Good-Byes: A True Story of Friendship, Family, and Farewells, to the beauty and emotional power of much shorter
handwritten notes. The notes include
drawings and poetry in a poesiealbum, or autograph book, kept by Debbie’s mother Jutta during
her last year in Germany in 1938. Young readers continue to add their own
poetry to Debbie’s Poesiealbum Project.
In Valerie Tripp’s American Girl book,
Changes for Kit, Kit Kittredge writes a letter to the editor dictated by
her uncle. She disagreed with it so completely that she wrote her own - and the
newspaper printed hers! The teachers who developed the website Books Kids Love include a long list of titles perfect for encouraging letter writing.
Letters help us preserve memories,
make political statements or just add pleasure to a friend’s day. Encourage
students to write and send a picture postcard from wherever they are going this
summer - or even from their own hometown.
It is a chance to practice the mechanics of writing an address correctly
when it includes more than just a @ and a dot. The space on a postcard is small
enough that even reluctant writers might be inspired. A 140-character Tweet
would fit just fine!
Encourage students to
•
describe
something colorful or interesting in a few carefully chosen words, or
•
tell what they
have been doing so that the reader could visualize it, or
•
make a connection
with the reader by mentioning something they have in common that relates to the
picture or place (hearing a band they both like, seeing a funny dog or cat,
flying a kite on the beach), or
•
send postcards to
a teacher at school so they can be shared in the fall.
Wishing everyone a lovely summer,
filled with books - and letters!
No comments:
Post a Comment