News Detail
Students Connect with International Pen-Pals
Oakies are making overseas friendships the old fashioned way—by snail mail.
Right before Christmas break, seventeen students in Ms. Vander Bleek’s seventh grade English class received their first letters from students at Clara-Fey Gymnasium, a Catholic school within the Archdiocese of Cologne in Bonn-Bad Godesberg, Germany. Oakies just sent back their own letters. It’s all part of a new pen-pal program that Ms. Vander Bleek and her English students are very excited about.
Correspondence between the two schools began after a teacher from Clara-Fey-Gymnasium reached out to Ms. Vander Bleek. Maria Pellerini-Falco (‘25), a new student at Oakcrest this year, used to attend Clara-Fey. After she left, her classmates in Germany missed her. They were also eager to know more about American culture. So it made sense to teachers on both sides of the Atlantic that they set up a pen-pal program between the Oakcrest and Clara-Fey students. Oakies are writing to a class of 27 girls aged 12 to 13 years old who have been learning English for at least four years. “We hope this provides our students with an opportunity to gain cultural perspective through good, old-fashioned snail mail while giving the young German students a way to practice their language skills,” says Ms. Vander Bleek.
This is not the first time that Oakcrest students have reached out to their international peers via old-fashioned letter-writing. Last year, Oakcrest teachers and freshmen deans Paula Rondon-Burgos and Jennifer Kilmer organized a letter writing session for ninth grade students. Oakies gathered at lunch to write to students at an all-girls Opus Dei school in the Congo.
