I get asked all the time if I throw my son’s creations away. Most do get recycled but one we have used over and over again is our mail box. The other day my son was playing with it when I decided to capitalize on his desire to sort everything and make a letter sorting activity for him. Our letters were sorted by the name on the envelope but you could use numbers and sort it with the zip code , or for even younger kids use different color letters and sort it by color. My son loved this and it even sparked writing a fan letter to his favorite baseball player.
- Gather your materials. You will need some boxes, paper, scissors, envelopes, pen, plain sticky labels and crayons.
- Start by writing addresses on the letters. If your child is able have them help or write the addresses themselves.
- Write 44 cents ( or whatever appropriate stamp amount) on your blank labels.
- Time to decorate. My son loved coloring these envelopes. He insisted on doing it all himself.
- While they do that depending on how many boxes you have write out the letters that will go in each box on paper.
- Attach them to the boxes.
- Next add on the stamps. My proudest moment of the day came next when my son said we should purposely leave off the stamp and make a do not deliver basket for those letters.
- So I made one quickly.
- Time to play- I made a simple sign for our post office and our mail box came to play too.
- Pop your mail in.
- Dump it out.
- Sort it.
- Deliver it – we delivered it to various rooms of our house.
Book
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Delivering Your Mail: A Book About Mail Carriers
That is so clever! love it
You come up with the greatest ideas! I love how perceptive he is…who would think a kid would notice if a piece of mail isn’t to be delivered because there is no stamp!
VERY cool!
Mailbox Magic by Nancy Poydar is another good book about the mailing process.
Love this idea! As soon as I saw this, I whipped up some mailboxes and put out the little play tents we have and we set up a neighborhood in the backyard. The kids loved matching the letters to the boxes! I used notecards for the envelopes and stickers as stamps. Thanks for the great ideas!
This is so cool! I had planned on creating a Mailbox for our Mailman Unit Study thats in 2 weeks! This will be perfect and my sons will love it! Thanks for such a neat idea!
Thank you for the wonderful inspiration! We had so much fun today making our own mail office http://czarnota.blogspot.com/2010/09/fun-with-letters.html
Thank you!!!!
hah! such a cute idea.
That does look like so much fun… can’t wait till my kiddos are old enough to try it.
how fun is that we will have to do that.
This was a cute idea. A different varity could be to make little house with a opening for the mail. On each house put the names of the people that lives in that house. Like MOM-DAD-SISTER for one house and another house GRANDMA-GRANDPA, And another for best friends family etc. When I was in grade school I saw a film about the post office and it left a lasting impression on me. Two years ago I retired from the post office
This is a super cute idea! Will definitely try this with my 3.5 year old. He loves “delivering packages/mail” to us!! Thanks for the idea! I’ll let you know how it goes.
Please do – I am eager to hear if he liked it!