The Postcard Creator helps students learn to identify all the typical parts of a postcard, and then generate their own postcard messages by typing information into templates. Students fill in the address, details on the postcard’s artwork, and the postcard message. The finished postcard can then be previewed, edited, and printed. After printing their texts, students can illustrate the front of their postcards in a variety of ways, including drawing a picture, creating a collage of images, or printing and pasting clipart in place.

The tool is easy to use, made even easier with the Postcard Planning Sheet, a printable PDF students can use to draft and revise their work before creating and printing their final postcards on the computer. See a completed sample Postcard based on Where the Wild Things Are for details on what a student’s work might look like. For additional ideas on how to use this tool, see Tips for Using Postcard Creator.

Visit this interactive tool at: http://www.readwritethink.org/materials/postcard/.

ReadWriteThink Lessons That Use This Tool

A Genre Study of Letters With The Jolly Postman (3-5)
In The Jolly Postman, a postman rides his bicycle delivering letters. To whom? Storybook and nursery rhyme characters! After reading The Jolly Postman, the students will learn the attributes of different types of mail. Then, the students will categorize the letters from the book, and finally their own mail.

A Musical Prompt: Postcards From the Concert (3-5)
Using music as a writing prompt, students engage in the sentence-combining strategy to enhance their writing skills while creating postcards to share with family and friends.

Introducing Shakespeare: Exploring Persona and Character Motivations (6-8)
Students are introduced to the concept of persona and examine how personality is revealed in a drama. To develop a richer understanding of Shakespeare's characters, students research Renaissance society and customs. After watching a scene from a Shakespeare play, students discuss the motivations of key characters and the relationships among them.

Mail Time! An Integrated Postcard and Geography Study (K-2)
Children love to receive mail. Can you imagine their excitement if they received a picture postcard at school? That’s what happens in this project! Children will write and receive postcards from friends and family, and then chart where all those postcards come from on their classroom map.

Multimedia Responses to Content Area Topics Using Fact–“Faction”–Fiction (3-5)
This lesson focuses on students' development of cooperative learning and inquiry-based skills, as well as the ways that fiction and nonfiction can be blended seamlessly into texts. Students read Diary of a Spider by Doreen Cronin, and then work in cooperative groups to research and synthesize information about spiders.

Note Writing in the Primary Classroom  (K-2)
Focus on authentic writing in your classroom by visibly using everyday notes in the classroom and inviting students to write short notes to themselves, friends, teachers, and family. This lesson invites students to write short everyday notes, to remind, plan, request or compliment, providing many natural opportunities for meaningful writing and lots of practice in encoding/decoding written text, drawing them into the world of real writing for real purposes.

Travel Brochures: Highlighting the Setting of a Story (6-8)
When reading a text, readers are often transported to the places mentioned through words and descriptions. This lesson plan invites students to think about the details in the texts they have read and then create a travel brochure about the setting. Students learn more about the places mentioned in the text while researching the setting of their text.

Who’s Got Mail? Using Literature to Promote Authentic Letter Writing (3-5)
This activity teaches and reinforces letter writing through read alouds and shared writing. Students discuss and chart letter elements and write their own letters to adults at school. This can lead to ongoing correspondence between adults and students, reinforcing letter-writing skills beyond the classroom lesson.