For Valentine’s Day we made some cards and sent them to Emma’s aunts, uncles and cousins that live in Los Angeles. I cut out animals from a roll of cute wrapping paper that I picked up at the reuse center and Emma pasted the animals on folded paper. We took a field trip to Paper Source and bought some red envelopes and came home to stamp (rubber stamp and postage stamp/sticker) and address them. The next day I thought it would be fun to walk downtown to the post office. The downtown Oakland post office is in a gorgeous old building and there was no line when we got there so bought some more postage stamps. We talked about all the p.o. boxes that we saw and dropped our valentine cards in a mail slot.

Since then I have actually had to mail a few other things and Emma has been super interested in the stamps, the writing on envelopes and such so today we made a mailbox. I used a shoe box and cut out a hole. She can lift the lid to take things out and then stick them back in again. I already had a whole bunch of little envelopes and cards for her to play with so we were good to go without any prep work involved. It was a fun activity to reinforce what she knows and include some pretend play. This could definitely be an activity that includes writing so we may incorporate that more next time. ^_^