In today's tech world, the art of writing a letter on paper has all but disappeared.  Niceties have been replaced by convenience.  I've been guilty of writing e-mail thank you notes, but sending a real thank you letter in the mail is always courteous and proper.  A few months ago, I attended a preview of Frontline's Digital Nation and one of the questions posed was, "We are the last generation to have a foot in both the non-digital and digital worlds.  What do we want to carry forward?"  I believe letter writing should be one of them.

Back in high school and college, I loved to write letters.  It was a way to write my stories to an audience (of one) before blogging came along.  This love of writing continues to this day.  I never really liked writing essays for English class or creative writing, but I have always enjoyed writing the stories of my life.  If I had never written letters, this whole world would never have opened for me.

So hopefully I can spread this love of writing to my kids.  For both my kids, their very first written "letters" were Valentine's Day cards for their classmates.  All they had to do was to write their friend's name and their own name on each tiny foldable card.  At three, I would hold their hand and help them draw the letters.  At four, I taught them to copy letters for each name from the class roster.  They loved the idea of exchanging cards and to this day, they enjoy taking out the old boxes of Valentines and looking over each card. 

My kids are in grade school now, and they are still only old enough write the obligatory thank you letters.  And this in itself can be quite a challenging feat.  When my son was five, I started having him write his own thank you cards.  Since he is complete perfectionist, he kept freaking out when his words would curve instead of following a straight line.  So I took a ruler and drew pencil lines for him.  Eventually, I printed thank you notes with lines on them and this has helped tremendously.

Last night, my daughter lost her second tooth at summer camp and it got lost on the playground.  I explained to her that we should write a letter to the tooth fairy explaining where she could find the tooth.  We could also draw a picture of the playground in the letter.  She immediately cried, "No!  I don't want to!" and "I don't care!"  To me, this was just a sign of being too tired.  So I offered to write the letter for her.  As soon as I started, she immediately piped in on which words I should use and explained where in the playground she thought the tooth was.  We placed the note under her pillow, and this morning she delighted to find that the tooth fairy did indeed receive her letter (only money was found, a letter back would have been nice, but the tooth fairy was busy writing this blog post).  Hopefully this will bring some understanding about the power of writing letters.

As they get older, I know that my kids won't be passing notes in school as this has been replaced by texting (yes I know this isn't allowed, but then again I know kids).  Even writing e-mails to friends will probably be replaced by instant messaging.  But hopefully, I can impress upon them the beauty of putting thoughts down on paper.

Contributing editor Angela blogs about parenting in this technology world over at mommy bytes.