Salaams Hana,

I'll be teaching a grade 4 class this year Insha'Allah. I wouldn't mind doing a post card exchange just as long as there is an exchange. But I'm in Canada. One year I called up another teacher at a school and had my kids write letters, like the pen pal thing, but in the end they were so disappointed because the other teacher never got her kids to reply to the letters. I couldn't do anything about that. So the following year, I had my class do pen pals again but did things a little differently. I had my students come up with fictious names. Of course, I didn't want them to write their real names or give out phone numbers because of safety issues. Also, they only thought they had 'real' pen pals. I actually got the grade 8 students at our school to be their pen pals and they pretended to be other people too. In the end, my class loved it. All the mail came in on time, I even had the secretary deliver the package to my class and no one found out. It was a good way to get them to write. The grade eights never said a word.