Posting a Letter in Lang Fang

from Aug 2


Today the preschoolers went on a field trip to the post office. We talked yesterday about different ways we communicate with other people: face to face, on the telephone, via email and by sending letters. We discussed the fact that you have to pay money to buy your stamp, put it on your envelope and put it in the mail box. We learned about delivery of the mail.


You would be surprised, perhaps, by how many blind children - even teens - in the states, don't know why we put stamps on the letters. (One kid in a class in Washington took a guess: "it tells when the letter was mailed?"). It's one of the things that falls between the cracks for blind students.


So, these preschoolers are now ahead of the game. They "wrote" letters to one another (e.g. "scribbled" using a Brailler and put foam stamps all over their pages. The ones with a little vision scribbled with a pen as well). Then we put our letters in the envelopes and Rosa wrote their addresses on them (since they cannot do this themselves).


Today we completed the learning experience with a trip to the post office in two taxi cabs, (since Bethel's van is down). Each child went to the window and said: "I would like to buy a stamp, please." They gave their one yuan (one dollar) and got back two jiao (20 cents). Then they glued on their stamps (with help from me - and yes, this involves putting glue on the stamp with a brush) and put them in the mailbox. The postal workers were pretty sweet about the whole thing. Fortunately there was only one other customer in the post office at the time, so we did not create an inconvenience for other customers.


The taxis waited for us, so we hopped in and returned to Bethel. Back in the little school room we taped another envelope into our "experience" books, and I gave them each one jiao to put into their envelopes.