I created this giant Dear Santa letter for my 4-year old to practice his writing and refine his wish list. He snooped through the mail a few weeks ago and fell in love with a catalog full of toys. He immediately started brainstorming his list. Oh, how I remember when that was the most important thing. He kept that catalog close by for days and gazed at his favorite pictures.
This is our first Christmas decoration this year. I spotted the large dry-erase poster board made to look like notebook paper in the school supplies section at Michaels. It was $2.99. I knew instantly that I wanted to make it into an oversized Dear Santa letter in the kitchen. I always love the oversized school and art supplies spread across the pages of Pottery Barn Kids catalogs. This is my much more affordable piece of schoolhouse whimsy.
I mounted the board to the fridge with poster tack. I used a black permanent marker to write “Dear Santa, All I want for Christmas is…” and “Love, Pepé”. The rest of the page is for my son to doodle on and write out his Christmas list. He will be free to practice and change it whenever he likes. The week before Christmas we will transfer it to a real letter to mail to Santa.
Please excuse my poor cursive, which has not been practiced since third grade. I started writing in cursive with a permanent marker, so I had to finish it in cursive. Also, I faked my son’s hand-writing with my left hand penmanship, although I am sure he wants a sandbox and legos :)
Ah, the Christmas catalogs! One year I went as far as to cut the things I wanted out of the Sears catalog. Santa found that quite confusing.
Cute idea!
How cute!
I love this idea–but thank you for putting my super-mom fears to rest too! I was sitting here staring at that blue handwriting trying to imagine, my three year old son, writing that well at age four! LOL–Love your site!
Tiffany,
Of course I had to be honest about the writing. My son does not write this well yet either. Although it was super fun to help him spell out everything he wanted to write on his list (all those transformers names have lots of letters to practice writing)! So the real reason I faked the writing…I was only able to squeeze in this project and taking pictures after he was in bed.