Staying in Touch With Your Pen Pal over the Summer
Just because the school year has ended doesn’t mean you have to lose touch with your buddies. You can stay in touch with your in-person friends by transforming them into penpal friends. While pen pals aren’t as common as they once were, they remain a terrific way to maintain a strong and solid connection through the art of letter writing.
Check out some tips on how to stay in touch, topics to discuss, and how to find a new pen pal if needed.
How to Stay in Touch
Setting up an agreement with your penpal friends can help keep the letters flowing and the relationship strong. Writing one letter per month to each other is a totally do-able schedule, although you can certainly agree to write as many letters to each other as you wish.
Figure out how you’ll kick off the connection, either with one person writing the first letter and the other person responding, or both agreeing to send out a letter by a certain date. Make sure you exchange addresses before you part for the summer so you’re both prepared to get the ball rolling.
Make the letter writing even more fun by stocking up on creative letter-writing supplies. These can include:
- Paper: Plain white paper can be so bland, especially when PaperDirect has so many colored paper options just waiting to brighten the day for both of you.
- Envelopes: Colorful envelopes are another cool option, and you can jazz them up even further with self-inking stamps or stickers.
- Postage stamps: Get a batch of festive postage stamps that will last all summer.
- Pens: Stock up on a few fabulous pens and markers to help your letters stand out even more.
What to Talk About
So what should you guys write about? You have tons of fresh and exciting options that go far beyond the same old stuff you chat about during the school year. You can talk about:
- Summer vacations – where you’re going, where you’ve been in the past, your best and worst vacations.
- Summer activities – your all-time favorites, least favorites, and what’s in store this year.
- How you spend your days – real-life versus what you wish you could be doing instead.
- Plans and goals for the upcoming school year.
- Lessons you’re learning, either by choice or through mistakes (oops!).
- The highlight and lowlight of each month, week or day, and why each item was a highlight or lowlight.
- Your favorite and least favorite – movies, summer fashions, places to go, TV shows, music, summer memories, school year memories, or anything else that strikes your fancy. You can even include a “Top 5” and “Worst 5” list in each of your letters, picking a different subject each time around.
Keep the conversation alive by asking your penpal friends to respond with the same type of information you shared, and it’s highly unlikely you’ll run out of things to discuss.
How to Find New Penpal Friends
Sometimes even the best letter-writing intentions can fizzle out, and you may find you want or need a new pen pal. Finding new penpal friends isn’t all that tough, as long as you know where to look.
- Relatives or friends of friends, especially those that live in different states or countries.
- People you meet on vacations.
- Connections from people in groups you belong to, like your soccer team, your art club, or your writers group.
- Facebook Groups, with a search for “pen pal kids” to find groups that connect penpal friends.
- Websites that help with pen pal connections, such as StudentsOfTheWorld.
Whether your summer is spent deepening your relationship with your school year friends or getting to know new ones, being a pen pal is a great way to do it and PaperDirect is here to help.