After all of our hard work last week making our letters to ask for stamps it was finally time for us to think about sending them out into the world. Over Golden Week for homework everyone wrote out 3 copies of the letter and after some final checking, rewriting some words and rubbing out of pencil marks we decided they were in a good condition to send.

Some letters were really eye catching; there are hand drawn pictures of Mount Fuji and the Japanese flag along with Sakura blossom petals and some original pictures. Everyone really wants to get a reply so they have tried really hard to create the best letter they could, let’s hope that all this hard work pays off!

The next step was to decide where to send our letters to, which proved more difficult that first expected. In order to get a response where should we send the letters? We thought about this and decided that if we sent the letters to schools then maybe some students would be interested and reply to us. This was a good start but of course we had to choose countries to send our letters to as well. Since everyone had written 3 letters we had to choose where to send each one.

After getting out their maps and thinking for a while someone realized: “The letters are in English so we should send one to an English speaking country.”

Everyone agreed, but what countries speak English?

Luckily in everyone’s atlas was a list of information, including language information.

“Look! This country speaks English!” said a few surprised voices.

Of course America, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand come to mind when we talk about English speaking countries but the students were surprised to find so many other.

As a result of this we decided to send the letters out as follows:
* a country the students have heard a lot about, an English speaking country
* a country whose national language is not English
* a country that the students did not know much about, but wanted to find out more

“I want to send a letter to Korea, it’s really close but I don’t know much about it.”

“How about Thailand? I heard they’re having demonstrations so I wonder if the post will get through?”

“Malawi! Where’s Malawi?!”

Some students searched for countries that are difficult to communicate with whereas some searched by looking through their atlas. Most could not explain their reasons for choosing a country, simply that they were curious about it.

Here is the list of our chosen countries.

English speaking countries
Jamaica, Canada, Ireland, South Africa, America, UK, Singapore, India, Australia

Countries whose national language is not English
Russia, France, Korea, Venezuela, Sweden, China, Thailand, Switzerland, Dominica

Countries difficult to communicate with
Saint Lucia, Philippines, Liberia, Antigua and Barbuda, Malawi, Papua New Guinea, Ethiopia, Bahamas

We decided to send letter to 2 schools that we have links to; our sister school in Australia, Fitzroy Community school and the primary school of our native English teacher. However these were really the exceptions, most schools we knew nothing about and of course had to search for them. This is where the internet proves to be a really useful tool. Simply by entering the keywords into a search engine “country name,” “elementary school” and “address” a whole list of schools pop up. These schools are mostly schools in English speaking countries or developed countries. The other types of school that come up in search results are American or International schools or in other words schools where most of the students are not from that country. We did luckily stumble upon a blog of schools that are similar to TCS which gave us a lot of information.

And so with our best wishes and hopes we sent off our letters in the post. We are looking forward to some replies!

Stay tuned for our video letters!