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A group of kindergarteners and their parents are reviving the art of letter writing during lockdown.
An idea started by mum of three, Jessmyn Pillegi - who you may remember from a story we wrote last week about food deliveries to AREC - thought it would be a nice idea for her son to write letters to some of his friends while in lockdown. Not only as a fun way to keep him busy, but also a way to practice important skills.
"I was just talking to [son] Jasper about - he obviously misses his friends and school and I asked him, what some things are that he needs to work on at home, that now he's got one-on-one [time] that we could work on together," Jessmyn said.
"And he's rattling off all this stuff like, 'oh, I need to be better on the monkey bars' and I'm like, 'no, let's talk about schoolwork. What could you do better?' And he's like, 'my writing'. So. said 'okay, so let's write letters to your school friends.'"
Bianca Williams lives out of town with her three children who, thanks to their relative isolation already, aren't too sure what the big deal about lockdown is. Bianca said her oldest, six-year-old Allie Claire, has taken up the letter-writing practice with aplomb. She said they took up letter writing during last year's lockdown but just a year later, the practice has taken on a practical slant, helping her improve Allie's reading and writing comprehension.
"This year, it means so much more to them in kindergarten, because they're learning to read and write. So they're - able to put those skills into practice," she said.
"I know some of them are putting something in so we put some carrot seeds and some tomato seeds in for them to plant. If we're in lockdown for a lot longer, you know, that'll be quite useful. A good activity for doing outside for the parents, just a little bit of education, I guess."
Charmaine Mckechnie's son Mac, an only child, has experienced lockdown a little differently and so mum was more than happy to embrace the letter writing project to help her son feel connected to his friends around town.
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"Unlike other kids, you know, we struggle with - we normally have a lot to do, we normally do more activities after school... So lockdown was a bit of a shock for us," she said.
"We do sight words at home normally, but we're not huge writers, that's not one of the homework things we've done. So it was good for me to see where he was up to with writing."
"Once I told my daughter, she was pretty excited," mum Victoria Muscat said of her daughter Alicia.
"It's sort of something different that you don't get time to do - when you're in your routine of school and life. They get to be creative as well with their pictures and communicate with their friends."
So far, between the roughly eight friends they have each written a couple of letters, often stuffing them with small gifts like stickers and seeds.
"It's just a nice way for them to be in touch instead of being on the computers all the time. Some of them probably wouldn't even know what writing a letter and putting a stamp on an envelope is like," Jessmyn said.
"It's really been good to see how creative some of the kids have been."
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