Writing Informal Emails

Part two of learning about letters was to compare to writing and sending emails!

First, the twins did a comprehension exercise based on an email text (from this book) and we talked briefly about the conventions in layout: the email subject, email addresses, the similar layout in terms of paragraphs and a "Dear...", "From..." beginning and end.

Then, I set up email accounts for the girls - including Z, as she had written a letter and posted it too - using Gmail. In hindsight, I wish I had adjusted their birth years so I could automatically forward their emails to mine (Google doesn't allow automatic forwarding for child accounts! And neither can I add their accounts to my phone as I set my email as the parent account which is already signed in on my phone... Settings might get confused, apparently, so it's not possible 😖) as now I need to manually log in to their accounts to check for replies... But this is a lesson in itself for them re: the conveniences of snail mail vs electronic! It may arrive there straightaway but that isn't much use if you forget to sign in and check. 😂

They watched me set up their accounts (the username F wanted was already taken so we added a number to the end; we talked about how usernames/email addresses are unique for everyone in the whole world!) and came up with a password (their first one lol... I set all 3 as the same for ease 😝).

When they composed their emails, in turn, we looked at the layout of the inbox, how to write an email by clicking "compose", what the subject line is for and where to put the recipient's address. They wrote a simple email to the same aunts they had sent letters to, explaining they were comparing the two forms of communication, and added emojis to their emails (which they enjoyed the most lol).

We talked about how email is free to do, how long it takes to arrive, the convenience of not needing to physically buy stamps or walk to a postbox and how mistakes in an email can be easily corrected, compared to rubbing out or crossing out written mistakes in a letter. We also didn't need to write the date or our own address because it was put there automatically for us.

So what could be the benefits of sending letters by post? Because you don't have to remember to check for a reply, it just comes! And if you want to send something (like Nani sent a present in the post to us) then you can't email it, you have to post it... And it's fun getting post. 😂

Writing Informal Letters

I bought the books The Jolly Postman and Dragon Post from Amazon as an introduction to the topic. We also watched the relevant episode of Let's Play on Amazon Prime (the twins are getting a bit old for this but still enjoyable for Z!).

We looked at the layouts of the different letters in the books to see if there was anything they all had in common - what were the features of a letter? Was there a difference between letters from friends (informal) and letters from businesses (formal)?

On a piece of coloured A4 paper, we wrote our own example letter (to Julian from Aunt Fanny - Famous Five themed again, their choice!) then glued in the centre of A3 paper and annotated it with the features we came up with.

Why is it useful to write your own address in the corner? So the recipient has it if they want to send a reply! Why is it useful to have the date? Because the letter won't arrive straightaway so it's good to know when it was sent!

We talked about how letters get to where we want them to go to and watched a couple of YouTube videos about Royal Mail - one posted only a few years ago and the other 10 years ago. We talked about how clever the machines were and how they hadn't really changed in 10 years... But before the machines were invented it must have taken a lot longer and been a lot more difficult!

We thought about who they could write letters to - who lived in the UK but not in Birmingham? Z cleverly commented there was no point wasting money posting letters to people in Birmingham because we could just give it to them instead! After going through all the possibilities they decided to write a letter each to some of my sisters living in different places (at school in Ipswich, university in Bristol and work in Leicester!). We thought it would be interesting to see if they would all receive their letters at the same time if we posted them all into the same postbox at the same time...

We looked into the difference between 1st class and 2nd class post. 1st class is meant to arrive the next working day ("What's a working day?!") including Saturday; 2nd class can take 2-3 working days to arrive. So we decided to use 2nd class for our experiment. We also talked about which kind of stamp cost more and why.

They wrote their letters, using the annotated poster from before as a guide, and we talked about the conventions of an envelope: stamp in the top right corner, address in the centre with the recipient's name at the top & postcode at the bottom, return address on the back.

We walked down the road to the nearest postbox for them to post their letters. While there, we read the information about last collection times and looked for the keyhole and handle to open the postbox. M was pleased she could explain what the "line" was down the side of the postbox - it's the door! It was a bit of a cold, windy day (remnants of Storm Ciara from the weekend!) so we talked about the inconvenience of needing to go out to send a message to someone faraway, as opposed to the technology nowadays of phones, emails and WhatsApp, etc. - all of which are sent straightaway and don't take days to arrive!

I found a simple map of the UK on Google Images which had Birmingham, Leicester, Bristol and Ipswich marked and printed it out for the girls. They needed to find the four cities and colour them different colours, then write a couple of sentences to explain what we had done.

When the letters arrive InshaAllah they can add at the bottom how long it took for their aunts to receive them! They're expecting Ipswich to maybe take longer because it's the furthest away, and Leicester to be delivered the quickest, but we'll see. 😁