VALPARAISO | Jenny Nam greeted her pen pals with picture frames.

In their first meeting after months of exchanging letters, the Valparaiso University elementary education major gave her Franklin Elementary School correspondents frames she decorated especially for them, in sports, music and design motifs.

Other pairs of pen pals greeted each other with hugs and smiles, as the East Chicago students visited VU on Friday in a culminating activity to the semester-long writing project.

The young students and the teachers-to-be toured the campus, shared a meal, played games and talked. They talked about some of the topics they had first written about: life, music, sports, school, family and the ISTEP test.

The pen pal project was fun, according to the elementary kids.

"It's good for our education," fourth-grader Wilber Coronado said.

"It helped if you want to become a writer," said fourth-grader Tierra Hood. "You get to write about things."

The VU students, too, got a lot out of the exchange.

To teach students, a teacher needs to understand them, sophomore Heather Poole said. The interaction introduced the VU students to a wider range of ethnic backgrounds, she said.

Finding out about the students' lives was a good way to relate to their concerns, said Tiana Quist, a sophomore from Libertyville, Ill.

Earlier in the week, the VU students visited a second group of pen pals at McKinley Elementary in East Chicago.

Two-way learning was the goal of the exchange, Franklin sixth-grade teacher Erin Nolan-Higgins said -- herself a 2004 graduate of the VU teacher education program.

As a student at VU, Portage native Nolan-Higgins benefited from a similar activity.

"I had no experience in an urban setting," she said. But after learning about inner-city teaching, she knew that's where she wanted to be.

"(That) class took me to where I am today," she said.

Friday's visit had an added benefit.

"Our kids get to meet students in a university setting. They can see it's possible to be here," Nolan-Higgins said.