Pardon Our Construction, Part 1

After our concept test last year, the big revelation was that we needed to go back and lay some groundwork. What is a letter? Who can you write to? And how does this little envelope actually wind up in their mailbox? We had taken for granted that our kid testers already knew these mechanics and would jump right into our letter writing prompts. They did not. We saw this as an opportunity and got to work developing the foundation of our correspondence materials.

Our Signature Kit begins with a three-part book series that teaches kids the basics of letter writing. Each booklet in the series uses storytelling to cover key aspects of writing letters. The stories engage kids and their grown-ups by drawing references from history, art, literature, and beyond. 

Even though letters by mail are not as common as they once were, they are still as magical as ever. The main challenge is to make letter writing relevant to kids again. The inexperience among our testers was not due to lack of ability or exposure, as they recalled learning about letters in 2nd or 3rd grade, and of course, knew the mail to be a quotidian occurrence; instead, what held them back was a lack of context. 

An online search of teaching resources for elementary school-aged children will return many hits for one-pager frameworks on the different parts of a letter (salutation, body, closing, etc.), with little on the emotional underpinnings of letters. Other resources describe the delivery process from mailbox to mailbox, but they often skip over the wonder of the medium. 

So who does one turn to for inspiration on letter writing? Famous letter writers, of course! Once such is the early 20th century French novelist Marcel Proust. As documented in his posthumously published correspondence, Proust was so much in the habit of writing letters that he often wrote to his mother from across the hall in their shared home.

Proust came into my awareness in college when I took a literature class on his masterpiece novel, In Search of Lost Time. In it, I discovered the most beautifully crafted sentences I had ever read. Many of those vignettes have stayed with me since. 

In Booklet 1 of the Introductory Guide, I reference an early scene from the novel in which the young protagonist devises a clever plan to get his mother to come to his room for a goodnight kiss. The vehicle? A letter. 

I think of this set up often when my kids find one reason or another for me to tuck them back into bed at night for the eighth time. You never know from where or when the spark of an idea will come. Yay for English majors everywhere.