After enjoying it so much last year with my son, I offered to help my daughter’s kinder with Santa letter writing this year. The children are four or five and heading towards starting school next year.
An array of letters to Santa, written by kinder children
Helping the children write
Working with two or three children at a time, I sat with the kinders to help them. Each child chose a texta (choice of colour is important!) and then copied Santa’s name from where I had written it.
Many of the children went on to write ‘can I please have’, while I wrote it for a few of them. Then they told me what they wanted to ask Santa for and I wrote it down – either for them to copy or directly onto their letter.
Sharing the letters
Children writing their letters to Santa
Once the entire group had written a letter (I went in during two different sessions), they were photocopied.
The children folded the original letters, placed them in an envelope and together they walked to a letterbox and posted their letters. By this time, they had learned how letters are formatted, practised their writing and seen how to mail a letter – it’s a great learning activity as well as being fun.
The kinder teacher placed the copies into the children’s portfolios which were given to parents as a Christmas gift after their concert.
Requests to Santa
While most of the children quickly rattled off a favourite gift idea or two, a few had trouble which surprised me. I hadn’t expected to have to help any child suggest what they wanted!
Not surprisingly, there were a number of requests for Lego, things from Frozen, cars and games. One girl very sweetly added ‘a gift for my little sister’ to her list.
Santa’s reply
In my usual role as Santa’s Letter Elf, I wrote a reply to the kinders, too.
It was fun to include each child in the letter somehow so they could feel it was truly for them when the teacher read it out to the group.
That is so sweet:) I remember my kids writing letters to Santa. In fact I still have them tucked away along with other keepsakes they made through the years.
It’s a great tradition for kids, and adults a like to share. It also helps children with grammar.
I have copies of the letters my children have written to Santa, too – and I love that the kinder teacher made sure the parents all got their own child’s letter to keep 🙂
So nice! Giving the parents the letters- will they get what they want?! I should start keeping letters before my kids aren’t kids anymore!
It is a lovely record of their childhood to have those letters – my children know I take a copy before we send the letters to Santa 🙂
I remember when my child Jonas wrote his first Christmas letter to Santa! I’ll cherish that moment for years to come! It’s a family tradition that should be preserved in order to teach children empathy towards others and how to properly converse via letter. Letter writing can be used to break a child out of their comfort zone early on, and for a good cause.
It is a great way of bonding with your kids and helping them (not matter how garish their colour choices may be). It also helps their English and once started, it just carries on going up to Christmas!
It is just a great activity altogether – bonding, teaching, fun, entertaining and it creates lovely memories, too.
Did any of the letters you wrote a reply to stand out to you? If not, did any of your replies stand out to you or the class? It sounds like lots of fun to do something like that.
Yes, there were a number of lovely letters the children wrote. Some of them were special because of how they were written or the response the individual child – like one little girl who wrote part of her letter then got me to finish it, but who came back 3 or 4 times for me to add more ideas to her list! And one boy refused to write on the front of the letter but used the blank back instead!
Another girl asked for something for her sister which was very sweet (and that was mentioned in the reply, of course!). One boy struggled to think of what to ask for (and knowing the kids a bit helped me give them suggestions) but eventually asked for some runners – he didn’t want toys!
It was interesting to compare to last year’s group where they all knew what to ask for and the list included a number of mobile phones!
heh, mobile phones, while it seems unimaginative, at least they wanted something extremely practical in this day and age. It was very sweet of the girl to ask for something for her sister, and the little girl who kept coming back must have been adorable!
Mobile phones are practical – but seem a bit over the top for four year olds, to me anyway!
And yes the little girl who added to her list was very cute – she’d sidle up and whisper the next item to me 🙂
I have a toddler an he is still not to keen on coloring or writing. This was a good opportunity to get him to try to take a pencil in his hands and get him into writing.
Writing to Santa can be a great motivation for those children not usually keen on drawing/writing :)fun and gets the message across.
This is a great idea:) I think this will help the kids to learn to communicate with others. I still recollect the fond memories when I was a child and believed in this:)
Do you also remember writing to Santa yourself Celine?
Good morning I wish that I was a princess
I’m sure you are already a princess to your parents Krista 🙂
And you can choose to act like a graceful, kind and generous princess at any time you know – Santa would love seeing that 😆
Gotta love that wish really, but like you say our kids are always prices and princesses to the parents, at least mine are to me.
That is very true, oportosanto!