CELPIP Listening Part 4 Practice Test: Pen Pals Across the Generations

NARRATOR: Residents of a seniors' residence in Victoria have taken up a habit many people thought had disappeared: writing letters by hand. Last fall, recreation coordinator Diane Price paired twenty residents of Maple Court with a grade three class at a nearby elementary school. Every two weeks, the children send a letter, and the residents write back. Price says the idea came from her grandmother, who kept every letter she ever received in a shoebox under her bed. At first, several residents worried that the children wouldn't be able to read their joined-up writing, which most schools stopped teaching years ago. So the class teacher spent a week showing her students how to read it, and the children now proudly sign their own names that way. The letters cover everything from hockey to lost teeth. Ninety-year-old Frank Delaney admits he considered the whole thing pointless at first. Now he says the letters are the highlight of his month, even if his pen pal, eight-year-old Sophie, has asked him three times what a typewriter is. The two groups finally met in person last Friday, when the class came for a reading afternoon. With school ending in June, Price is now looking for volunteers to carry letters back and forth over the summer.