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After enjoying it so much last year with my son, I offered to help my daughter’s kinder with Santa letter writing this year. The children are four or five and heading towards starting school next year.

An array of letters to Santa, written by kinder children

An array of letters to Santa, written by kinder children

Helping the children write

Working with two or three children at a time, I sat with the kinders to help them. Each child chose a texta (choice of colour is important!) and then copied Santa’s name from where I had written it.

Many of the children went on to write ‘can I please have’, while I wrote it for a few of them. Then they told me what they wanted to ask Santa for and I wrote it down – either for them to copy or directly onto their letter.

Sharing the letters

Image collage of children's hands writting a letter to Santa

Children writing their letters to Santa

Once the entire group had written a letter (I went in during two different sessions), they were photocopied.

The children folded the original letters, placed them in an envelope and together they walked to a letterbox and posted their letters. By this time, they had learned how letters are formatted, practised their writing and seen how to mail a letter – it’s a great learning activity as well as being fun.

The kinder teacher placed the copies into the children’s portfolios which were given to parents as a Christmas gift after their concert.

Requests to Santa

While most of the children quickly rattled off a favourite gift idea or two, a few had trouble which surprised me. I hadn’t expected to have to help any child suggest what they wanted!

Not surprisingly, there were a number of requests for Lego, things from Frozen, cars and games. One girl very sweetly added ‘a gift for my little sister’ to her list.

Santa’s reply

In my usual role as Santa’s Letter Elf, I wrote a reply to the kinders, too.

It was fun to include each child in the letter somehow so they could feel it was truly for them when the teacher read it out to the group.