Melissa Gormley’s kindergarten class at Fletcher School participated in an ABC Exchange with kindergarten classrooms across the country.

Fletcher Elementary School kindergarteners have taken learning their ‘ABCs’ to a completely new level this school year.

Students in Melissa Gormley’s kindergarten class have been participating in an “ABC Exchange” with kindergarten classrooms from across the country.

“I thought this would be a great experience for our students to learn about other kindergarten classrooms from around the country,” said Gormley, who found out about the exchange through an online group of kindergarten teachers.

Twenty-six classrooms, including Gormley’s, participated.

“We received 25 letters and ‘letters’ with them,” Gormley said. “Our letter was the letter ‘Z’ and we decorated it like a zebra! I then wrote a letter about our school and what one can find in Jamestown, New York. I then mailed off our 25 letters and awaited our mail from other classrooms to come.”

The kindergarteners were mesmerized as the mail from their friends across the country began to pile up. A classroom from Michigan told Gormley’s class about a tulip festival that occurs each spring, while another classroom from Louisville, Kentucky told the class about the Louisville Slugger bats that are produced there. The students were even more excited to find out that there is a Jamestown, North Carolina, she noted.

“My students loved it when we started to receive the letters,” Gormley said. “We read each letter during our snack time and we learned so much about the other schools.”

Once the letters were received, Gormley and her students designed a bulletin board display that hangs outside of the classroom. The board shows each of the letters and the locations from which they originated. Letters were received from as south as Florida and as far away as California.

“My kids have been amazed to visually see from how far away some of these letters came,” Gormley said. “This has been a great way to open our friends’ eyes to know the world that exists beyond Jamestown.”