Corresponding with Your Partner School 

Connect your classroom with a WWCS partner school through Lunch Money!  Classrooms can opt to correspond with their recipient school and learn firsthand what school is like for children in India.

Sample Letters
Read the excerpts below from a letter between schools in Minnesota, USA and India. 

Dear friends,

Hello from the 1st graders!  We live in Minnesota in the United States.  In Minnesota winters are cold and snowy.  We got a lot of snow in the month of March.  Do you have weather like that?  Today it is raining.  Does it rain a lot where you live?  In school we sing and learn about God. Sometimes we dance in music class. We also read, write, do math and learn about things in science and social studies.  Right now we are learning about animals.  What do you like to study about? We have been learning about your country. Some of us think you are lucky because you have elephants in your country and we don’t.  We think you have more snakes than we do too. Some of the favorite things we learned about were the Taj Mahal, your national bird, the peacock, tigers and other birds and animals found in India.  We got to eat Indian food and we heard a concert with the sitar and tabla drums.  Later we watched Indian dancers who told us stories with their dances. We had fun learning about your country and would like to visit it some day. We hope you are learning a lot in your school too.

Sincerely, The First Graders

Namaste from India!  

So many letters with so many questions!  I was excited to read all of them and we will do our best to answer all your questions.  We live in the southern part of our country and in the northern part of our state, Tamil Nadu.  Our language is Tamil.  Now it is summer here.  We had heavy rains with thunderstorms this summer.  The temperature is around 40 degrees Celsius.  Here it becomes slightly cold in winter, but it is never too cold.  Usually summer here is very hot.  This week it is not so hot because we had good rains.  The spring here is pleasant.  Here in Tamil Nadu, we never experience snowfall.  When we see snowfall on TV we just long to experience snow some day.  We know it must be fun playing with snow! 

Our school campus has lots of trees.  We have 527 students in our school, till the 10^th grade.  Altogether there are 20 teachers.  We learn Tamil, English, Math, Science and Social Studies.  We have sports like volleyball and cricket. 

Mostly, primary and kindergarten children come to the school by school bus.  Some walk two or three miles to school, while others ride their own bicycles. We wear our school uniforms every day.  Girls in primary school wear pink shirts with navy blue pinafores, and boys wear pink shirts with navy blue trousers.  Girls in high school wear brown Salwar-khameez (an Indian dress) and boys wear brown pants and shirts. 

We have two recesses – one in the morning and another in the afternoon.  We hop, skip, and we also play “catch me” during recess.   We have lunch break from 12:25 pm to 1:05 pm.  We have chicken curry, lentil curry, spinach curry, etc. for lunch.  We do not have pizzas and hamburgers for our regular diet in our villages.  In bigger cities and towns, they are common.  We have never seen strawberries other than in the pictures.  They look rosy red.  It sure must be tasty.  Some of our apples are imported from Washington.  They taste better than our Indian ones.  Our school ends at 3:30 pm.  Some students stay for special classes up to 5:30.  At home, we do our homework and then we play games, watch TV, have dinner and retire to bed.  Bathing in the well is one of our pleasures, especially for the boys.

I am wearing a new white shirt and an orange skirt.  Smaller girls here wear frocks, shirts with pants, skirts with blouses, Midis and Salwar-khameez.  Bigger girls wear Salwar-khameez, Dhavanis and Cholis.  Western clothes are rarely worn by bigger girls.  Smaller boys wear trousers and shirts, and bigger ones wear pants and shirts.  Women wear Sarees.  In cities, pants and skirts with tops are common among girls and ladies.  We use both shoes and sandals for footwear.

Commonly, we have dogs and cats as pets.  Otherwise, we have domestic animals like goats, sheep, and birds, like hens.  There are no camels in the area we are living.  They are in the northwestern part of the country – in the Thar Desert.

Thanks for your lunch money and love.

Sincerely, Joanna