We changed a system for foster parents and children to correspond each other.
Until now, about half of our foster children had been writing simple thank-you letters. A few of them genuinely wanted to greet their parents abroad. Most were encouragement by their own parents or the local person in charge of the foster children program to write. And by misunderstanding that writing a letter is an obligation, some had started to copy someone else’s letter as well as to ask someone else to write a letter for him/her.
And at the same time, a few children who have an ability to write well had kept writing letters almost every time we visited although their parents have little chance to write them back.
If a parent writes 1 letter while a child writes 3 letters in a year, their conversation doesn’t go smooth. If a child makes a fake letter or copied letter, the content of such a letter doesn’t match what his/her foster parent has written. It’s been our challenge how to solve these issues.
Now we stop to count on children’s letters as a method to improve their writing skills. Instead, we start word games and practical writing lessons, and hence we stop to collect letters from children. Only when parents write, we ask the children who receive letters to write back.
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