Okay, so for a while now I have been asking family and friends, as well as some BrillKid members to send postcards from wherever they are located to my daughter, in exchange for ones sent from us to their child/children…my 2-year-old is absolutely fascinated by receiving mail, and every evening after dinner we ‘visit’ a new country…she even gets a ‘stamp’ in her ‘passport,’
When she gets postcards we have a special place for them and we carefully look each place up on her map and on the Internet to have a mini EK lesson…now she is addicted to a fantastic Montessori-style App called Introtogeo…
After reading Kimba15’s blog on teaching geography I have been Inspired to make this into a regular project! (thanks Kimba 15, fantastic blog, fantastic map and we will be following your progress!). So my question is, does anybody out there in the BrillKids Worldwide Cultural Ether want to exchange postcards and learn about geography in this way with us?! I am determined that my child will not fall into the typically American Pitfall/Stereotype of being geographically challenged lol
If you are interested, please PM me as we will not want to post addresses here! Let’s keep it primarily simple, postcards with lovely landmarks adrressed to the kiddos!
I truly hope this piques your interest!
If anyone wants to write H. here in Ohio, I will make sure he replies with a nice postcard. I’m sure he would want to get postcards from all around the world.
This is a great idea! We are temporarily living in the Philippines right now, and will be traveling around Southeast Asia quite a bit in the next few months. Ella has been getting postcards and letters from the Little Passports program for the last several months so she already gets the idea. It will be exciting for her to have someone to write to as she travels to different countries herself. I don’t have much time to write right now, but I will PM you guys to get your addresses soon!
I am definantly in. This is a great idea and one I was thinking of. WOuldn’t it be great if the kids could all eventually become penpals
Oh by the way Kerileanne99 thanks for following my blog. I hope I can impart more info soon. I’m hoping to do North America next or Oceania and slowly moving to Europe, Africa and Asia. It is alot of fun to do.
We are visiting Eastern Europe for the next couple of months, – Ukraine, Serbia, Hungary! And my LOs LOVE LOVE LOVE geography! They both can name all the countries we’ve been too, where our relatives and friends live ( we are talking in a few dozens, ha) and the first thing my daughter was asking her new friend on the airplane “which country you are from”, she loves finding them on the map!
Love your ideas Kerry! We do tons of geography activities and always looking for new ones. My daughetr can not write yet, but she dictates to me when we write grandparents, so we will do that with the postcard too.
So, send me a PM with your address and we will return a postcard hoping to get one from each of you!
We can even call it BrillKids Geography Club, :yes: ! Or Little Traveller Club We should come up with the name, what do you all think?
Good idea! I suggest we mention the age of our children in the pm too so that we can adapt the info according to age.
As my children cannot write yet I also wondered if It wouldnt be better to print the text off, paste it on the card and then sign. Would you mind? I am suggesting this as sometimes I cannot read my own handwriting :-))
Btw:: is there somebody from Africa interested in exchanging?
I am glad people are as excited as I am! Hhhhmmm…I hadn’t thought too much about the logistics, but definitely include the ages of your children in the PM.
I think would be absolutely fine to type out a bit of text if you like EarlyLearning17! This would be a great time saver and I think many of the kids aren’t writing yet! For the ones that are, it will be great practice and incentive :yes:
I think including some basic facts would be great too, if you are so inclined, but don’t feel obligated! Some of the fun will be the differences and individuality of the cards. I think it would be perfectly acceptable to only write something like, “Hello from your friend in X!”
And of course, some people are already friends already, so these will probably be a bit more personalized!
Oh! Just a thought. I am always looking for small ways to interest my child in other languages, so it might be fun if you include a greeting in your native language, or if you know it from a place you are visiting :nowink:
Happy to send postcards from Australia. I am sure I can add something interesting about this beautiful place too. Jaykob may write it…if he is in the mood lol Otherwise I have two lovely big girls who will get a kick out of it
One is already in the mail this could be an interesting experiment in the speed of the world postal service too :nowink:
This is a great idea - my DH set up a similar thing for my daughter through an adult website where they exchanged both postcards and gifts (at Christmas) and I used them a bit to teach geography, but it would be really nice to do it on here and send some brief info about our own countries with the postcards. Laurana is not yet up to writing postcards though she may sign her name if encouraged. I like the idea of greetings in other languages too. I am from South Africa.
How lucky are we? after exchanging pms with only 6 fellow members, we have 5 continents covered! Although if we differentiate between North and South America, we are missing an exchange from South America…anybody from there?
Thanks so much for bringing this great idea up! Who knows, maybe some of us will develop into a more regular penfriendship? If there is enough interest, maybe we could for example send out a new round of cards once we travel to nearby countries (which we are doing once a year). My postcards will be coming from Europe by the way…
I’m in too. While it’s unlikely that any of you are teaching your children Irish, I can definitely include cúpla focal as Gaeilge (a couple of words in Irish). Great idea Keri!
count me in from Africa , not native but well almost , been there for the last 20 years . what i did for geography : made a huge wall hanging could be put on the floor map of the continents color coded the montessori way , thank i had those plastic drawers trolleys five each , added to one of them to create one trolley with one drawer for each continent , and it has been our treasure box , any time we find something receive something from a continent we just file it in the assigned drawer . i labelled each drawer with the name of the continent and a small sandpaper shape of the continent . i put in postcards, coins , souvenirs books i found about the continent , now i am adding notes about sites so we remember to visit them when we are working on a specific country , also toob animals and those are so good i really recommend buying them , i started out with schleich but they are not cheap , i could buy a whole toob of 10 animals for the price of one schleich. kids love them . instead of playing pretend play with princesses and pirates , now i find them setting up scenes from various countries .
now we are working on our north america drawer , i got two toobs for it , it started with a simple book about cowboys and now this book found a place in our NA drawer .
I am happy to send postcards from our side of the world , maybe also coins would be good exchange ???
viv
That was fun, ours are on the way!
Should take two to four weeks, so please pm me if they havent arrived by mid april!
I definitely recommend printing the text off: with font size 11 and a bigger line spacing we could just about say what we wanted to say in a first post card I will pm you the text in advance as we suggested that parents show some images or maybe even a youtube video of the famous things of our country
Still missing sb from South America and also the address of our representative of North America…that would be you, DadDude
My boy can’t write yet, so i’ll send one on his behalf!
this could be an interesting experiment in the speed of the world postal service too :nowink: