Young Thinkers saying Thanks!

I think one of the most important things we can teach our young thinkers is to be thankful. Regardless of circumstances, there's always a reason to feel blessed.  I want my kids (children, nieces, nephews, students-anyone!)  to learn to say thankful.  Grand-Daddy John in our family is big on thank you cards. I must say, I have not always been the best at having my kids write them.  Even as a teacher I used to hand out paper and have kids write thank you notices (or drawings) to our guests.  But even then the process was often rushed.  Last night while browsing Pinterest, I stumbled across an app called Red Stamp that was featured on Momfilter.com 

I thought how perfect!
We can teach our little thinkers to be thankful ...
AND
How to write for an authentic audience..
WHILE
Using technology.  
(It is FREE!)

I took some screenshots on my phone of the process if you'd like to see a little of what you can do before you chose to download it.

The icon for the Red Stamp is the last app on this screenshot, white with red letters.  Just so you know what you're looking for after it downloads. 

This is what it looks like when you open it up.  There are pages and pages of categories to choose from.  I went with the thank you section because that's what my Little Thinker needed to write. But as you can see from this screenshot you can send anything from holiday cards to calendars.   

Once you've opened up your selection, you have EVEN MORE CHOICES!  You can select various categories along the top to narrow down the type of thank you (holiday/calendar/invitation) that you want to send.  

Think now that you've picked out your card you are done choosing, right?  Wrong.  If you look along the side of this screenshot you can see that you have many choices regarding font size and color.  This is nice because you can pick one that works well with your photo.  (Oh, and you don't have to send a photo-card but why not when you have such cute Little Thinkers to choose from?)

If this isn't the bees-knees I don't know what is.  You can take a photo, choose from your camera, instagram, or facebook.  How cool is that?  It's even got social media covered.  So if you have a facebook account for your family/class you probably already  have tons of pics to choose from.

There are even three filter choices for the photos.  I went with color on this one but the black and white & Sepia look nice too. :)

Now for the writing part.  Have a hard time knowing what to say?  Well if you click the speech bubble on the card, it will give you suggested phrases.  You can use this one or not.  We didn't use it because Little E knew what he wanted to say.  However, I wanted to share this feature.

Now your card is all finished you can decide how you want to share it with others.

If you want a more traditional approach you can even mail by post!  I'm not sure of the cost of this service though because I haven't actually done it.  We emailed our cards out.  

One super sweet thank you card from Little E, my oldest Little Thinker.  :)