"How about 'Hope to hear from you soon'?" Bullus says before Sophie returns to her letter to add the final detail.

The year one student and her classmates are no strangers to letter-writing, with the school selected as one of Australia Post's trial schools for its Pen Pal Club last year.

As students return for the 2020 school years, the postal service along with the Indigenous Literacy Foundation have rolled out the program to more than 5300 schools across the country, with Kaleen Primary School back on board for another year.

"We were doing a letter writing unit as part of our literacy program last year. The pen pal link up gave us a letter-writing opportunity so the children could use their literacy skills for real writing," kindergarten teacher Karina Harris says.

"They were very excited to write a letter and then receive a letter.

"We were paired up with a school in Gladstone, Queensland and despite fires and floods, the mail got through. Sometimes a little tattered but we had a couple of different correspondence opportunities writing back and forth and sending pictures.

"It really gave the children a boost in terms of 'wow, writing serves a purpose and we can communicate with people at a distance and we can receive mail back and learn a little bit about each other's lives from different parts of Australia."

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Accompanying the program is the picture book The Pen Pal Club, written by Sally Morgan and illustrated by Annie White, which follows the journey of pen pals from diverse settings across Australia who exchange handwritten letters with each other. Together, the book and the program aim to help build the reading and writing skills to the next generation and to get primary school-aged children around the country excited about connecting with others through letter writing.

"There has been a lot of public discussion around the need to improve youth literacy across the country," Australia Post's head of community Nicky Tracey says.

"Through the Pen Pal Club children can experience the fun and excitement of getting something in the mail, and connecting with others, sometimes from different cultures and across great distances, while developing their reading and writing skills."

For the students at Kaleen Primary School, they were interested in what uniform colours other schools have, the size of the classes and the sorts of toys they like to play with - all important things to know when you're six years old.

"They were just really interested in what a school was like in a different part of Australia and then they wrote things back and forth to respond to those kinds of questions," Harris says.

"But it was teaching the children the meaningful purpose of letter writing which is a dying skill in a way because of increased emailing and other social media platforms. Fewer people write letters for fun so we talked about how mostly families get bills in the mail and wouldn't it be nice to get other kinds of letters. You never know, it may inspire them to continue writing letters."