Letter Writing

by Bernie H.
from Virtuous Daughters, August 2002~Volume 2, Number 5

My daughters encouraged me to write about how we have encouraged them to write letters here at the house and about how I have been involved in the past in what we called a round robin letter group.  

I have made it part of our school week to write a letter each week.  They are more than welcome to write more letters, but I want to read and correct at least 1 letter for each child per week.  They choose whom they write and what they write about.  This has been a good project to get them to writing and a source of constant material for me to correct and teach grammar, sentence structure, and spelling.  I don’t tell them where they have made the mistake, I just tell them on each line if there are any spelling mistakes or punctuation mistakes, etc.  They then try to find it and correct it.  I keep correcting it until it is ready for the final form.

A round robin letter group fits unique circumstances.  It would be a group of mutual family or friends that wanted to write one another.  With e-mail there is probably not as great of a call for this.  But, at our house, we have found that sending and receiving e-mail is not a substitute for sending and receiving a letter in the mailbox.  Maybe we are old-fashioned. 

I have been involved in a round robin letter group at 2 different times in my life.  It was a lot of fun.  The first one I did was a group of ladies (there were 4 of us).  We had all gone to the same church and participated in a discipleship group together.  One by one all but one moved from the town.  We all wanted to keep up with the others but being busy young mothers we each knew we could not keep up with the commitment to write the other 3.  So one person wrote one letter and sent it to the next on the list.  The next on the list added her letter with the other letter and sent it to the next on the list and so on until it came full circle.  When the packet of letters came back to the first on the list, she removed her letter, and put a fresh one in its spot.  We came up with certain rules like try to get your letter off within a month,  You will know what kind of rules your group will need. We also would include pictures of our families at different times.  One of the girls got cancer and died.  The letters really ministered to us all.  The other group was with my family.  There are 4 of us girls.  At one time we all lived in a different city including my mother.  So we had a round robin.  The situation has changed with 3 living in the same town.  So I am no longer in a round robin group.  I have kept those letters of mine that I had pulled each month.  Since I have not always been good to journal like I wished I had, these have served as a glimpse into our home at that time.  It was still a commitment, but the benefits were great!