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Writing a letter to a favorite author is the kind of activity that sounds simple on the surface and turns out to be quietly extraordinary. It takes a child’s natural love of stories and transforms it into something active, intentional, and deeply meaningful. It bridges reading and writing in a way that feels like neither. And it plants a seed about what literacy actually is, not a skill to be drilled, but a living thing that connects us to other people and to the world.
Why Author Letters Work as Early Literacy Activities
One of the most important things early literacy research tells us is that young children learn language and literacy best when it is embedded in real purpose and genuine relationships. Worksheets and drills can build isolated skills, but they rarely build on what matters most: the belief that words are worth something. That what you have to say deserves to be written down.
Writing to a favorite author does something no worksheet can. It gives a child a real reason to communicate in writing. There is someone on the other end. That someone created something the child loves. And the child has something to say to them.
For pre-writers, this activity is still deeply valuable as an early literacy activity. A child can dictate their letter while a parent or teacher writes it down. They can illustrate it. They can sign their name, even if that signature looks more like a collection of loops than legible letters. All of it teaches something real about what writing is for, and in the age of technology these important writing skills are becoming lost in our newest generation.
What to Do Before You Write: Reading Together First
The letter begins long before anyone picks up a pencil. It begins with the early literacy books themselves. Something deeply special happens when parents read to their children.
Before writing, spend time with your book of choice in a different way. Read it slowly. Pause and notice things you might have moved past before, the way an illustrator uses color to show a character’s mood, the way an author chooses a specific word instead of a simpler one, or anything else that speaks to you and your child. These observations become the material for the letter.
Some questions that help young children find what they want to say:
- What is your favorite part?
- Why do you think the author made that happen?
- Is there a character you love?
- What would you want that character to know?
- Did this book make you feel something?
- Can you describe what that feeling was?
- Is there anything you wish the book had that it didn’t?
- Is there something you want to ask?
The goal is not to produce a perfectly structured piece of writing. The goal is to surface something genuine, a real thought, a real question, a real piece of your child’s inner life that is worth sharing. You know your child best. Ask the questions they’ll want to answer!
How to Actually Send It
Many authors and illustrators can be reached through their publishers, whose contact information is typically listed on the copyright page of the book or on the author’s official website. Some authors are active on social media and have shared that they genuinely love hearing from young readers. Others have PO boxes listed specifically for fan mail.
A few things worth knowing: most children’s book authors receive a significant amount of mail, and responses are not guaranteed. But many authors do respond, sometimes with a postcard, sometimes with a signed bookplate, sometimes with a full letter back. Checking the mailbox in wait itself becomes part of the experience. And when something arrives, the electricity of it is something a child does not forget.
Whether or not a response comes, the value of the activity lives in the making of the letter, not the receiving of one. Make it extra fun by adding stickers, drawings, paper puppets of the book’s characters, or anything else that calls to your child’s creativity.
Early Literacy Books That Tend to Inspire the Best Letters
Some early literacy books seem to generate a particularly strong pull in young readers, the kind of attachment that makes a child want to reach through the page.
A few that tend to spark great letters (and with authors known to love letters by mail):
Any book by Mo Willems, whose Pigeon and Elephant and Piggie characters inspire love in young readers and whose author is genuinely beloved by children who feel like they know him personally through his work.
Books by Jacqueline Woodson, whose language is so precise and so beautiful that even young children sense they are in the presence of something special, even before they can articulate why.
Early literacy books by Peter H. Reynolds, particularly The Dot and Ish, which are about creative courage and tend to make children feel deeply seen, exactly the feeling that makes someone want to write back.
Books by Julia Donaldson, whose rhythmic language children memorize almost involuntarily and whose stories generate the kind of deep familiarity that feels like friendship.
The best early literacy books to write to the authors of are the ones that have already been read more times than you can count. The ones a child reaches for again and again not because they don’t know what happens, but because the world inside them is one they want to return to.
What This Activity Teaches Beyond Literacy
There is something worth naming about what writing to an author teaches that goes beyond early literacy skills, important as those are.
It teaches children that the things they love were made by real people. That someone sat down, had an idea, struggled with it, and eventually made something that found its way to this child, in this reading nook, on this particular afternoon.
It teaches them that their response to that thing—their love of it, their questions about it, and their feelings—is worth expressing.
And it teaches them, in the most concrete possible way, that literacy is not just about decoding. It is about connection, and connection is always the way in which children learn best.
At Little Sunshine’s Playhouse, activities like this are exactly the kind of early literacy experiences we believe in, ones rooted in genuine purpose, real relationship, and a child’s natural love of stories. We would love to show you what that looks like in our classrooms! Schedule a tour at a school near you to see these values in action.
Keep reading! Parents that read raise children who read!
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