We have had some exciting moments in P2 this week. One of them was to do with our writing. We have been practising our letter-writing skills since the start of January and we are getting better and better, but we know that our letters to Santa and Ms McMaster might not get replies as you would be hard-pressed to find two busier people! We were very excited this week to find out that we were going to start writing to people that would (in theory!) write back. We have new penpals! The P3/2s at Mrs Weatherston Sharma’s old school, Seafield Primary, have agreed to write to us if we write to them. Today, everyone got paired up with someone from Seafield and wrote them an introductory letter. We wrote some information about ourselves and asked our penpal a question to help us find out more about them.
We talked at length about the safety of such interactions. We know that we mustn’t talk to strangers, so how do we know it is safe to write to these children? We talked about how teachers work to keep children safe and that the Seafield P3/2s’ teacher is a known and trusted member of West Lothian’s staff and that she can vouch for – and keep safe – her own pupils. We also discussed what we knew about what was safe to tell people about ourselves. We know very well that we don’t give any personal, sensitive information about ourselves to people we don’t know and haven’t met, including our penpals. We all agreed that we should never reveal our surnames, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses or any other identifying information to anyone we don’t know and that we wouldn’t put this information into our letters.

We are very excited to write our letters and to hear back from our penpals. We’ll let you know as soon as their letters come through!