Snailmail

Aliceana is great at reading and spelling when she’s in the mood, which is hardly never. It’s a hurdle that I’ve been trying to deal with when it comes to unschooling. So I try to make things fun. Some days we’ll use sight word flash cards and copy the words onto a dry erase board, because to a 5 year old dry erase boards are pretty magical. Some days we’ll read an entire book and get a small reward after (anything from playing after or maybe going out to dinner.) I find the key is for her to be in a good mood when she’s reading or writing, otherwise she’ll be incredibly stubborn and stop being receptive to the whole learning process. I have no idea where she got the stubborn gene from. 

Today we sent some snail mail. We wrote letters to a couple of our favorite people, the first time I gave her a blank piece of paper without lines, which led to hard to read sentences because they were steeply declining down the page. I don’t blame Aliceana I can barely write in a straight line.

Then I drew lines on a sheet with Sharpie so she was able to write a little more consistently. We then went downstairs to photocopy the sheet, because she loves using our all in one printer to copy things. Do you remember how fun copy machines were back in the day?

In case you’re wondering she hasn’t even thought of photocopying her hand yet, which is actually pretty surprising. I’m pretty sure that’s all I ever thought copiers were for when I was a kid.

So we ended up writing a second letter, the contents were quite cute. “I love you. I love cookies. Cake is delicious.” I definitely had to help a little bit when we got to the word “delicious.” I think she was hungry when we wrote this letter. It’s funny to see how exhausting writing 3 sentences can be for a five year old.

We found the last two stamps in our junk drawer, addressed the envelopes, put cute Trader Joe’s stickers on the seal of the envelope and put them in our mailbox.

We had so much fun, I think I’m going to need to buy a lot more stamps.