Gratituesday & Works for Me Wednesday: GRAD Libs

With the advent of e-mail and text messages, the art of the hand-written thank-you note seems to have become a thing of the past.  Somehow, however, e-mails and text messages just don’t convey the same feelings as a  thoughtfully hand-penned note that can be held in your hands, read again and again, and cherished for years to come.

Since they were able to pick up a crayon, our boys have “written” thank-you notes to family and friends who blessed them with a gift or thoughtful gesture.  Initially, they scribbled or painted their thanks onto a card to which I added a brief interpretation, and then when they learned to write their name, they would sign a note written in “their voice.”  When Connor started kindergarten this year, however, we felt that he was ready to take a bit more responsibility for his notes of thanks, but not quite ready to write the entire note on his own as his third-grader brother now does.  Enter GRAD Libs, named for those fill-in-the-blank books I remember, with a chuckle, from my childhood.

To write his GRAD Libs, Connor and I discuss what he would like to say to the gift giver.  I then type up the note with blanks in a few key places.  Connor chooses the clip art he would like to use to decorate his note and the GRAD Libs are printed.  Connor then sets to work filling in the blanks.

The notes really allow Connor’s personality… and his gratitude… to shine through.  In a recent GRAD Lib,  he described an adored gift as “very, very, very cool, cool, cool!”  A description that was clearly, all his own!