BookPALS Aids Child Literacy with Pencil PALS

Pen Pals for Children Program Helps Improve Writing Skills for Kids

Apr 22, 2009

An adjunct of Screen Actors Guild Foundation's literacy program BookPALS, Pencil PALS helps improve writing skills for children by finding pen pals for kids.

Natalie Rogers had a problem. As the Florida Program Director for Book PALS, a popular literacy program that sends actors into schools on weekly visits to read to kids, she had dozens of volunteers eager to promote children’s literacy – yet many were retirees or working actors unable to go to schools and interact with kids every week.

Rogers’ solution? Create Pencil PALS – an adjunct program to BookPALS that pairs adult volunteers with elementary students, letting them become pen pals for the school year. As students spent their year writing letters back and forth with their pen pals, their writing skills improved – as did the writing scores on many students’ standardized tests.

Inspired by this success, other BookPALS branches began adopting Pencil PALS – allowing the program to spread from Florida to other states including Arizona and California.

Improving Writing Skills One Letter at a Time

Pencil PAL volunteers correspond regularly with their students, who send out new letters each month. To help create good pairings, students and volunteer Pencil Pals fill out questionnaires on their interests at the beginning of the year. Sometimes, these pairings can be incredibly well-matched.

“One [Pencil Pal] calls herself an Orlando Magic fanatic,” states Rogers. “[And] she happened to be paired with a student who absolutely loves NBA basketball, so she would find all kinds of really cool books on basketball and send him autographs and photos from some of the players.”

Other students like talking about their hobbies with their Pencil Pals – like 5th grade gamer Christopher Hayward who wrote enthusiastically in his letters about playing Laser Quest and becoming James Bond and Darth Vader in his favorite computer games.

Many pen pals also write about their favorite books and read the same books together during the year. To encourage children’s literacy, some Pencil PALS programs can arrange to supply kids in low income schools with books they can read with their Pencil Pals.

While some might expect adults to teach kids about good books, often it can go the other way around.

“[My student] has been sending me lists of books that she’s read – and I haven’t been able to find them at the main library,” laughs Arizona Pencil Pal Sue Cohen. “So I think I’m going to have to go to her school and read the books so we can talk about them.”

New Pen Pals for Children Programs

Over the last three years, Rogers has been experimenting with a new PencilPALS program that allows high school students to correspond with elementary schools kids.

“Right now I have a class of preparatory high school sophomore English students writing to a class of third graders at a more at-risk public school,” she states. “And the rapport between them is really cool because the [third graders] really look up to these kids. We’re trying to get the elementary school kids to go on a field trip this year to the private school and give them a tour of it so they can see what’s out there.”

Meeting Pencil Pals

At the end of each school year, Pencil Pals get to meet their students face-to-face at a party held at the participating schools. Many times, students enjoy the writing process so much they get permission from their parents to continue writing to their pen pal.

“The longest we’ve had a student and volunteer write to each other is six years – and that’s pretty good since the program’s been around for only seven years,” states Rogers. “And there are several out there who have been writing for three or four years.”

However long these pen pal relationships last, the camaraderie developed between the students and their Pencil Pals, along with the improvements in reading and writing skills make this an excellent program for encouraging child literacy.

The copyright of the article BookPALS Aids Child Literacy with Pencil PALS in Youth Activities is owned by Michael Jung. Permission to republish BookPALS Aids Child Literacy with Pencil PALS in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.