E-Pal Correspondence Between Preservice Teachers and Second Graders

The following are a few comments made by preservice teachers about their participation in the spring semester e-pal project:

• “All of us are early childhood majors and we don’t do much field experience with upper grades. I think it good for us to see a second grader’s writing and to get experience interacting on a second grader’s level. I’ve gotten to experience a different level that you don’t see in kindergarten like the way she’s [the e-pal] already formed her complete personality and she’s a whole person all the way around. She knows what she likes, what she doesn’t like and she’s not wish washy like the kindergarteners we deal with most often.”
• “There was a period of time when they [the second grade e-pals] got real busy and their letters ceased for a while. There were students here [at the university] that were getting their feelings hurt because they weren’t getting letters. It just shows that once this program got started and we started corresponding back and forth, we expected their letters just as much as they expected ours.”
• “To me, that’s what the teaching profession is all about, making a difference in the students’ lives we touch, however small. Through the e-mail somehow I feel that I have made a difference. I have helped him. I have made him feel proud. Maybe he got the most letters, I certainly didn’t write a lot when I wrote him. I wrote a lot of little letters, but to him that was significant and I’ve loved it.”
• “It’s such a rewarding experience and I would suggest and encourage all teachers to get on the system and use it with their students.”

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From “Electronic Dialoguing in a Preservice Reading Methods Course: A Yearlong Study” by Denise Johnson.
Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted July 2002