Purposeful Pen Pals Roosevelt Elementary, Gu Students Enhance Their Learning With A Semester Of Mutual Letter Writing

When Professor Deborah Nieding picks up the mail at Roosevelt Elementary School on Thursdays, she never knows what to expect. Some weeks she’ll find letters written on a 10-inch gourd, a paper snowflake or paper feathers.

The unusual correspondence is part of a pen-pal project that has been going on for four years. Each semester, Nieding asks her junior and senior-level education students at Gonzaga University to write one letter a week to a second- or fourth-grade student at Roosevelt.

The college students and the children become pen pals.

Last Thursday, the pen pals met at Gonzaga. As their semester ended, the college students invited their pen pals from Pat Cook’s second-grade class and Cindy Malmquist’s fourth-grade class to tour the GU campus.

The pen pals paired off to tour the art museum, the gym and the student center. At the end of the three-hour visit, the college students gave each pen pal a notebook containing copies of every letter they had received.

Denie Inman, a college senior, gave Justin Slack, 7, copies of all but two of the youngster’s letters. “She kept the snowflake mobile he made her and the gourd,” said his mother, Nancy Slack. During the semester, second-grader Justin never needed prompting to sit down and write to his pen pal, his mother said.

Inman’s letters were especially creative. For Halloween she sent Justin a haunted house made of construction paper. The doors swung open, and inside was a letter to Justin.

That inspired Justin to send her a Thanksgiving turkey - made from a 10-inch gourd, construction paper and feathers. Justin wrote his letter on the paper feathers he glued to the gourd.

Over the course of the semester, Nancy Slack said her son’s penmanship improved. So did his writing. The letters became longer and more detailed.

“He really thinks about what he wants to write now,” Slack said.

Justin and Inman read a book together and talked about it in a letter, she said.

“It goes way beyond what I remember writing as a kid - the ‘Hi, how are you. I’m fine,”’ Slack said. The correspondence has a dual purpose: to encourage children to expand their writing skills and to help college students, about to become teachers, see the world through a child’s eyes.

More often than not, teaching college students to be teachers involves studying theory, Nieding said.

Though education students get classroom experience, they don’t always get to know children as individuals.

When Nieding was earning her doctorate at the University of Missouri-Columbia, she came up with the idea of pairing college students with children.

Writing one another proved an effective way for both groups of students - elementary and college - to benefit.

Rather than training student teachers who think that all of the students just need to read from one book, they go out knowing each child has individual talent, Nieding said. All children don’t learn the same way, she added.

“Some kids learn better visually. Some kids don’t write much, but they talk a blue streak,” Nieding said.

“This year we have a child who is very shy. She doesn’t talk, but she writes. So we, as a class, brain-stormed about what we could do to help her learn,” Nieding said.

Four years ago, Nieding met Diana Moone, then principal at Roosevelt. Moone recommended Pat Cook as the teacher to contact. Now Cook’s second-graders write to two college pen-pals every year.

“They get so excited - writing a letter to somebody who is really going to read it,” Cook said. “And they get these wonderful letters back.”

Cook said initially the children’s letters are usually short, but by the end of the year they’ve lengthened to three or four pages and often have become more descriptive and conversational. For example, Cook said, the children must think about how to describe a pet.

“What does that rabbit look like?” she said.

And she likes the idea that the children are able to see their own progress at the end of each semester.

“The college students save every letter and put them together in a notebook at the end of the semester,” Cook said. “It makes a wonderful memento for when you’re 92 years old.”

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