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Hi all,

Sorry for the copy and paste nature of this post.  I work in Thailand and this is a thread I have just started on a Thai teaching forum.  I figured this might be a better place to ask, so here is the post..

As with many schools (i guess) mine is jumping on the ASEAN bandwagon and using it as a clever little marketing strategy.

I have an idea which will both suit their sales methods, and do a fair amount of good for the kids (and maybe for me too).

I would like to find schools in some of the ASEAN countries and suggest to them the idea of starting a penpal scheme between out k3 students.

I have not yet put a huge amount of thought into, but at the moment how I would do it is by arranging fairly simple but relevant topics with their teachers, spending a lesson or so each month of pre-teaching or fine tuning the language, then getting each student in the class to write a small number of lines on the back of a hand drawn post card...

Personally I would suggest topics that are both universal but also reflect the cultural differences; like our daily routines, or our taste in food. These sort of things will highlight the fact that each country has a national identity, while as the same time showing the kids that many traits/likes/etc. are shared.

So, maybe once a month we would recieve a bag full of postcards, which I would read out to the class. We would then talk a bit about what surprised us, about what similarities there were, etc.

At this point I don't know whether I would encourage students to pick/be given individual pen pals, or to keep it as a class to class thing. Any thoughts?

I have three k3 classes in my school, so I was thinking about setting it up with schools in Burma, Cambodia and Laos. Any thoughts?

If anybody knows of any schools in any ASEAN countries (though perhaps not inter schools, as my students' English is not that hot), then I would be most grateful for contact info.

Thanks in advance