 Hey everybody, welcome to the Waldoch Way. I'm Jessica and today's video is going to be all about our Mail Time Monday routine or kind of like how we do it. So first, before I show you everything that we do and tell you about it, I wanna tell you guys that we've been doing Mail Time Monday on and off since Emily was in kindergarten. And it really started, so her birthday is in July and it started when we started back to school and kindergarten and it really was just us setting a day every week that she would start doing thank you cards for her birthday gifts. And it was so simple, I would use a highlighter and I would write like, I would get a thank you card and the front would say thank you and so inside of the highlighter I would say like for the Barbie and she would just trace it. It was super, super simple. I would address the card, I'd put it in the envelope, she'd get to put stickers all over it but I did a big portion of it and it was just an intentional time for us to sit down and for her to start with like one or two. It took us like a month to get them all done but it wasn't a big deal. The important part to me was that she was sending thank you cards and thanking people. And that slowly just became our thing and we really enjoyed it and it started morphing into me and her sitting down together and both sending cards to people who had birthdays coming up or just a quick little note or holidays like Valentine's or Christmas cards and it just slowly kept kind of becoming our thing. And so it's such a great way for us to connect with people, send acts of kindness to people and to like sneak in some writing practice and especially that real world writing practice that we just kept doing it. And over the years, this is now our third year doing it it has just slowly morphed into something a little bit bigger. So now our Mail Time Monday starts with us actually reading mail which that can be anything that we've gotten from pen pals, from people writing back to us or even our subscription letters. So whatever we've received in the last week the first thing we do is we sit down and we read whatever letters we have. So we may have one or two subscription letters, we may not have any subscription letters and it may be like I said, pen pal letters. Sometimes we have no letters but that's very rare that that happens. Luckily most of the subscriptions mail a few days apart. And so what I do is I check the mail and anything that we have, I just set it aside. I set it on top of our Mail Time bin which I will show you in just a minute and I keep everything together. So Monday rolls around and I grab the bin and I grab whatever letters are on top and we sit down on the table and we just dive in. I keep a letter, like a little piece of paper. I can't show you because it has a lot of personal information on it. But I keep a piece of paper in the very top bin that has all of our friends and families birthdays, all of our friends and families mailing addresses and we just reference that. So we sit down and we will read through our letters that we have and we'll talk about like this is whose birthday is coming up the next couple of weeks, these are the holidays that are coming up and there's just no pressure. She can just draw if she wants to just draw. She can write a message if she wants to write a message. There's no requirement on who she writes to or how many words she writes. It's just a time for us to sit down and enjoy it together. But I have noticed that just through us doing Mail Time Monday and having fun, we are learning a time because our subscription letters cover geography and science and all kinds of things like that and so we're learning as we're sitting down reading together and then I just slowly teach things to her. So one day she was writing a letter and I just slowly said like, hey, you know when you write a letter, you write dear so and so and then you put a comma and then I slowly taught her how to close the letter properly and now she does everything herself. So she even goes as far as addressing the letters herself properly, which has just been really nice to see over the past three years the transition from her tracing to now she's writing full blown letters and addressing envelopes properly. So that's kind of how we've gotten to where we are now but just know that when we first started, it was super simple. It was just us trying to write thank you letters for our birthday. We also do Christmas. So a lot of this past month has been us writing, you know, thank you letters for Christmas until we are super behind on but that's just how it started. Super sweet and simple. It was nothing fancy and it's grown. So over the three years that we've been doing it, it's grown into something bigger. So don't think that if you wanna start incorporating it, you have to have subscription letters coming in or you have to have all this stuff cause you totally don't. You can just sit down with blank pieces of printer paper and pens, pencils and markers or crayons or whatever your kids like and draw a picture and still have no time of day together. Like it doesn't have to be fancy. Okay, so this is what I have. I keep this like giant section sterilite container. I think it actually only came with three sections and I bought two and like combined them into there's now five sections to it. And within it, I have things like stamps and washi tape. We have tons and tons of stickers, like tons and tons of stickers. And then I have some note cards and blank cards where she can draw her own cards. And then in the very, very top, like I said, I also like to keep a list of the people's birthdays and addresses. I have some return address labels so we don't have to write our return address on all of them. And then I also keep stamps so that I can put the stamp and immediately get it right in the mailbox because if I don't get it in the mailbox immediately, chances are it's not actually going to go out. So having this little kind of like kit ready to go means I just grab it and that's it. That's all we have to do. So like I said, I keep our letters just on top of it. It sits just like this in my office and when it is Mailtime Monday, I grab whatever letters are off the top. This bin, sit it down on the table and then just kind of open and spread everything out and we just sit down and have a blast which you are actually going to get to join us for that right now. We have two letters today for Mailtime Monday. One is from Writings from the Wild and the other is American Heritage Adventure. So which would you like to read? This one. The American Heritage or the Writings from the Wild? Writings from the Wild. Yeah, that's kind of what I thought. That's definitely got Emily written all over it. Of North America. Where do you think we're going? Are you ready to find out? All right, American Heritage. We are going to Denali National Park. Cool. Hello, my friends. I can hardly believe I'm really visiting Denali, the tall one, standing at 20,310 feet above sea level. Denali is North America's tallest peak and is magnificent to behold. All right, so, are you ready to write some mail now? So yeah. Okay, so these are the things that we have coming up in the next few weeks. We have Nana's birthday, Uncle Jamie's birthday and then we have Valentine's Day. So you don't have to write a card for them, but if you would like, those are the people that have birthdays and that is the holiday coming up. I'm gonna start with Valentine's Day. You're gonna do a Valentine's card. Okay. I think I am just going to write a note to a friend. Yep. Can you pass me the- I sure will. Thanks, mommy. Here you go. Get my red and draw a big heart. Okay. Can you reach all the Sharpies? Yes, ma'am. Okay. I hope you guys enjoyed learning a little bit more about our Mail Time Monday tradition and joining us just to kind of see a little sneak peak into what that looks like. And if you do anything similar to this in your homeschool, I would love to hear more about it in the comments down below. Or if you incorporate it after having learned about it or kind of seen how we do it here, please tag me so that I can see you and your kids enjoying the lost form of snail milk. I would absolutely love to see that.