Thanks everyone for all of the great ideas! As a student teacher, I'm trying to find as many fun ideas as I can to help my kids understand writing letters. This will definitely help!

My kids (and the first grade classes) in our school are participating in the Flat Stanley project. It is a wonderful way to get the kids excited to write friendly letters AND learn about other places. You can visit the Flat Stanley site at www.flatstanley.com. Over the past two years, our Stanleys have visited about 15 states, Canada, Greece, Australia, and England. Awesome fun!

We often write thank you letters to people who help our class, put on assemblies, etc.

How about write to a favorite author?

This isn't all that inventive, but when we do a school-wide post office in February, my kids loved writing to their Kindergarten teachers. I also had them write pen pal letters with another first grade class in the school. (We have 12 first grade classes, so there's lots of kids they don't know!)

I don't work in first grade, but when I did a field study in first grade they wrote letters to the tooth fairy. They read a book about a little bunny rabbit with a loose tooth (I can't remember the name of the book) and then wrote their letters. It was very cute!

I'm working with my 1st grade students on writing friendly letters right now. They'll be starting penpals in Dec., but right now I'm looking for ideas on work they can do during workshop time. For the most part, most of my 25 kids are understanding it! What kinds of activities can they do besides writing to a classmate? What have other teachers tried? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!