Guidelines

All guidelines must be followed in order to participate in the International Art Pen Pals Program.

If you’d like to participate in our program, fill out and submit the registration form on our join page to be added to our database! From there, we will take your information and match you with another school teacher in a different location.

Once a match is made and confirmed by both teachers, it is their responsibility to communicate with one another and establish the following.

  1. Type of artwork- Are you sending physical artwork through mail, digital by scanning student work and sending via email, or doing a combination of the two? We encourage traditional mail when possible as it can give the students a more tangible connection!
  2. Art Pen Pal Timeline- How many times will you swap? What month and day will you send work on? With busy curriculums, you may only swap once or even twice in a year. We suggest teachers ship or email each other’s work on the same day.
  3. Distribution of Work- Will you distribute received artwork randomly among your classes OR will you assign students to one another as pairs? For example (with pairing method), if Maria is handed work made by Thomas in Italy, then we want to make sure Thomas is receiving Maria’s work in New Zealand. See our helpful hints page for some examples on how to easily pair students. If swapping only one time, we suggest using a simple random distribution.
  4. Protect Student Privacy- Teachers are to look through all artwork and any written letters before sending to ensure that only first names are used and that students have not shared any private information such as home address, social media accounts, etc. If two students in the group have the same name, a teacher may add their last initial to differentiate between the two.
  5. Send Enough Work- Make sure that you understand how many students you need to create for! Odds are, you won’t have completely identical class numbers. Best option is for the teacher with the smaller amount of students to have some students create more than one piece.
  6. If you’d like to join the Gallery- You can only submit your own student’s artwork to the gallery. Make sure you take pictures or scan them before you ship them! The gallery serves as an International Digital Art Exhibition that is ever growing. If you’d like to submit photographs of your class to the gallery, we’d be happy to share those as well with parental permission for any students being photographed. See the gallery page for more details on submission.
  7. Notify us when you complete a successful swap! And also if you are having any difficulties. We love to hear updates from our participants.

*Note: At this time, International Art Pen Pals does not cover the cost for any shipping between participants.