Pen Pals on the Internet

by Carol Anne Scott (fscott@usc.edu )

If you're a kid on the Internet, you probably have at least one Internet pen pal. When I interviewed over 50 kids, the number of pen pals—or key pals, as they're called on the Internet—that each person had ranged from 1 to 50. "I like having email pen pals because it doesn't take as long as snail mail to receive a letter back," said one email correspondent. Another girl wrote, "I don't get mail in my real mail box every day, so it's fun to write people. Having email pen pals is faster and less trouble."

All of the kids I interviewed liked pen pals. "I enjoy writing to pen pals and learning about other places!" said a 12-year-old. "I really love writing to pen-pals, because I love meeting new people. And, I love getting mail!" raved a 10-year-old girl.

While most kids limit their letters to other kids, some write to adults, too. One girl who's 13 has a good Internet friend who's an adult. She said, "My BEST Internet pal is 38. I did my school speech on him! I won! I really enjoy writing to pen pals!"

Pen pals can also help if you want to learn another language. Marie is a 12-year-old native French speaker who also speaks English. She teaches some of her pen pals French, and she also polishes her English by writing to English-speaking kids.

It's really easy to find pen pals on the Internet. You can find them from looking at people's home pages, or just surfing the Web. Here are some places to post ads for pen pals and read the ads of others. Some are just for kids, but most are for kids and adults.

KIDLINK is an organization where just kids can chat and have pen pals.

Global Heinemann Keypals posts ads for pen pals from individual students, and entire classes.

Maddy's Penpal List is one of the many pen pal pages run by individuals. This unique page is run by 6-year-old Madelin Blacha, creator of Maddy Mayhem's Kids' Stuff. She and her mom sort pen pal ads by age.

The International E-Mail Pen-Pal List is a site where you can look at a long list of people's names, their email addresses, and one descriptive word. You can list yourself easily.

There are lots of newsgroups just for pen pals—try soc.penpals. Most of the people posting are adults, so parents might want to supervise their kids.

And, of course, Yahoo— Society and Culture:Friendship:Pen Pals has a huge list of sites to find pen pals.

Writing to pen pals can be a fun learning experience. I know I enjoy writing to mine!

Carol Anne Scott is a 13-year-old writer and Web climber; visit her home page at http://www- scf.usc.edu/~fscott/cshomepg.htm.