Friday Letters Home-My Favorite Classroom Activity

If you are like me you are an avid Pinterest surfer. This summer I found a pin on Friday Letters Home and was completely intrigued by the concept. Students write a weekly letter home to their parents and the parents respond to their child on the back. At the end of the year the letters are bound, made into a book, and sent home with the kiddos giving them a super cute keepsake. The activity is designed to reinforce writing concepts with students while getting their parents actively involved in their child's education.

Implementing this activity in your classroom is super simple.Download the free forms from this website, glue the coversheet to a folder with brads, run off double sided copies of the papers, and begin writing letters.

This activity has been a HUGE success in my classroom. I love it, the kiddos love it, and the parents love it. The kiddos love the activity because they get to give their parents homework on the weekends! They also get a wonderful letter to read from their parents that lets them know how much they are valued and how proud their parents are of them. The parents love it because they get a peek into what their child has done in school the previous week. I love it because the children get to practice their writing skills. We also get to review what we have done in school during the week, and I have a running record that shows the children's skills progression during the year.

The letters reinforce sentence structure, the proper use of capital letters, subject-verb agreement, and punctuation. This week we worked on adjectives so the students will have to add colorful adjectives to their parent letters to make them more interesting to read-taking what we learned in class and applying it in a practical way.

If you decide to try this idea in your classroom and are looking for stationary to use I created a file that you can download here. The file is filled with all the writing paper you will need for the entire year. Border themes include: fall, Halloween, Thanksgiving, winter, Christmas, Valentine's Day, spring, and much more.