When we encourage our children to write cards are we encouraging budding authors?

Our yards, parks, and trails are filled with flowers and insects. As I went through my emails today, I saw a homeschool site encouraging children to learn about insects and their habitats. The children drew and labeled the insects and their habitats in sketchbooks, adding color and descriptions of how the insects used those habitats. But the neatest idea was what she encouraged her children to do with their observations and drawings.

This homeschooling mom helped her children use those drawings to make notecards! Grandparents, friends, aunts, and uncles all love receiving handwritten notes from our children. The writing could be extended to a ministry for children’s or veteran’s hospitals. A sweet note, a poem, or a simple Happy Birthday inside a hand-drawn card often means much more than a store-bought gift.

If children needed more cards than they could draw or if they wanted to save their originals why not check with local print shops to reproduce the drawings? I find local print shops offer prices far below the highly advertised online printers.

How can this activity be beneficial for children? In the picture above I see lots of science. Dandelions are a great food source for bees which in turn is a great food source for us in their ability to pollinate our gardens and give us honey. Children can discover seed distribution just by blowing the seed heads. Observing the bee will allow the children to see insect body parts, coloration, and flight patterns. There are so many ways to take this into deeper studies.

Then the card making. What shall we write? Are the children learning rhyming words? Haiku? Short greetings? Free-form poetry? Favorite Bible verses? Having a purpose for writing encourages writing. There are also ways to include reading literature. Robert Frost is my favorite poet. He has so many poems about nature. Charles Ghinga is a modern children’s poet with lots of nature poetry. The ways to use literature and writing in snail mail cards are limitless. Maybe your children have their own ideas of what to draw and write for others.

Remember drawings don’t have to be perfect, just drawn with love. Now to the park with pencils in hand. Gail Cartee

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