Letter writing with quills ...

Line of Inquiry: Change

Today we experienced what it was like to write with a pen made out of a feather called a quill.  

Mila enjoyed using the quill pen.

I spent time with each child to help them hold the quill and follow along the dotted lines of their names. Mila was th eonlly child that actually liked using the quill.  All of the other children wanted the felt pens:

It's too hard, I don't like this

I don't like this, felts are better and faster

This is taking way too long

It's too hard to hold

These are the differences that the children noticed between quill pens and pens of today:

plastic makes it easier to hold

feathers don't have handles to hold

feathers are supposed to keep birds warm not be pens

Needless to say, the children think that pens and felts of today are a great improvement over quill pens!

The children created their valentines post cards with stamping hearts, and using the quill pen.

Tomorrow (Wednesday) I will mail out the cards, but before doing so we needed to talk about that process using the letter above as an example.  Cameron recognized that this was a letter, he read the "middle words" and told us that the letter is for Creative Minds.  Together we figured out that the words on the top corner were from the sender, and the picture in the other corner is a sticker called a stamp.  The children also knew the stamp meant that the letter was "paid for to travel."  We are hoping that our valentines gets to their homes by February 14th !