Hi there! I’m Jay, and I want to tell you about something really cool—mail! When I was in school, I had a pen pal from China. A pen pal is a friend you write letters to, even if they live far away. I wrote a letter to my pen pal, and after a few weeks, I got a letter back. It was amazing to hold a letter that traveled all the way from China!
My friend Violet asked a great question: How does mail get delivered? Let’s find out!
People send all sorts of things by mail, like birthday cards, holiday presents, and even medicines. In the United States, about 420 million pieces of mail are delivered every day! That’s a lot of mail!
Mail goes through four main stops to reach its destination:
At the processing center, mail is sorted into different bins based on where it needs to go. Machines help sort the mail super fast! They take pictures of the addresses and sort the letters into the right bins. But sometimes, if the machine can’t read an address, special postal workers step in to help.
Once the mail is sorted, it’s packed into trucks or planes to go to the delivery center. There, it’s sorted again by individual address. Then, a mail carrier takes the mail and delivers it. Depending on where you live, the mail carrier might use a truck, walk, or even ride a bicycle. In some places, like the Grand Canyon, mail is delivered by mule!
Delivering mail is a big job that needs lots of people and machines working together. It’s like a team! If one part of the system doesn’t work, the mail won’t arrive. But thanks to this amazing system, billions of pieces of mail are delivered every year in the U.S.!
Next time you get a piece of mail, think about the incredible journey it took to reach you. So many people and machines helped it get to your hands!
That’s all for today! Thanks for asking such a great question, Violet. Remember, there are mysteries all around us. Stay curious, and see you next time!
Mail Journey Map: Create a map of the journey your mail takes from your mailbox to its destination. Use crayons or colored pencils to draw each step of the mail’s journey. Label each part of the journey: Mailbox, Processing Center, Delivery Center, and Final Destination. Share your map with a friend or family member and explain how mail travels!
Role-Playing Game: Pretend to be different workers in the mail delivery system. You can be a postal worker collecting mail, a machine sorting letters, or a mail carrier delivering mail. Use toy trucks, boxes, or even just your imagination to act out each role. Think about what each person or machine does and how important their job is in getting the mail delivered.
Mail Observation Walk: Take a walk around your neighborhood with an adult and look for mailboxes, mail trucks, or mail carriers. Notice how the mailboxes are different from each other. If you see a mail carrier, wave hello and think about all the places they might be delivering mail to. Discuss with your adult how mail might be delivered differently in other parts of the world, like by bicycle or mule.
Sure! Here’s a sanitized version of the transcript:
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Hi, it’s Jay! When I was in second grade, my class got pen pals—friends from far away. Each student in our class was paired with a student in China. I wrote a letter to my pen pal introducing myself and sent it. Weeks later, I received a letter in the mail. My pen pal wrote back, and it was so cool to hold the letter in my hands, knowing it had traveled from my new friend’s home halfway around the world.
Someone named Violet has a question about this. Let’s call Violet now.
Hi, Jay! I have a question for you: How does mail get delivered?
That’s a great question! Think of all the things that people send by mail. We send Valentine’s cards, holiday presents, birthday cards, postcards, and some people even receive medicines by mail. People can send almost anything through the mail—from bathtubs to bugs! It’s easy to think that delivering mail is as simple as someone looking at a letter, reading the address, and then taking the mail to that address. That might work if a mail carrier only had one letter to deliver, but these days, way more than one letter gets delivered every day. In the U.S., an average of 420 million pieces of mail are delivered every single day!
So how does mail get from one mailbox to another? Now would be a good time to pause the video and discuss.
Okay, ready? Delivering millions of pieces of mail daily isn’t easy, and a lot of this mail isn’t just going around the block either. It might be traveling to another city or even another country. Most mail makes at least four stops along its journey. It might go something like this: First, a person puts mail in a mailbox—that’s stop one. From there, it goes to a processing center—that’s stop two. From the processing center, it goes to a delivery center—stop three. Then finally, it arrives in the mailbox of the person it was sent to—stop four.
Getting mail from one stop to another takes work. Let’s imagine I wrote you a letter. I put the letter in an envelope, write your address on the front, add a stamp, and drop it in a mailbox—stop one. After that, a postal worker empties the mailbox and gets the mail to a processing center—stop two. A processing center can contain thousands of pieces of mail, and each piece needs to go to a different place. My letter to you might be piled next to a birthday present that needs to get to New York City, an important medicine that needs to get to Northern Alaska, and a Valentine headed to the coast of New Zealand.
Here at the processing center, each piece of mail is sorted into a different bin depending on where it needs to go. If you had to sort all these letters by hand, it would take forever! Luckily, the workers here have the help of some speedy machines. As each letter whizzes through the machine, a camera takes a picture of the address so fast you can hardly see it happen. From the picture, a computer identifies where that address is, and the machine sorts each letter into the right bin. A machine can do this for thousands of letters per hour.
Even so, sometimes these machines need human help. For example, what if the computer can’t read the address on my letter to you? What if I wrote messily or accidentally left something out? In these cases, it’s time to call in the experts. When the computer can’t read the address, a photo of the letter is sent to a special office where specially trained postal workers carefully read each address in person.
Once all the letters have been sorted, workers can pack each bin of mail into a truck or plane to send it to a delivery center closer to where it needs to go—that’s stop three. When the mail arrives, it gets sorted again, this time by individual address, sometimes with the machine and sometimes by hand. This can take hours.
Then, a postal worker takes the day’s mail and sets out to deliver it. Depending on where you live, your mail carrier might travel their daily route in a truck, on foot, or even by bicycle. In Arizona, some mail is even delivered by mule to get mail to people living at the bottom of the Grand Canyon!
No matter what it takes to get there, finally, the mail carrier drops mail off at its final destination—stop four.
In summary, it takes a lot of work to deliver mail. Many people and machines have to work together to get a letter from the sender to a mailbox, to a processing center, to a delivery center, and finally to the destination. Each part of the process depends on all the others. It’s a system! If just one part of the system broke, the mail wouldn’t arrive. Yet billions of pieces of mail are delivered in the U.S. each year.
Next time you pick up a piece of mail, take a second to think about the epic journey it took and all the people and technology that helped get it into your hands.
That’s all for this week’s question. Thanks for asking it, Violet! Now for the next episode, we reached into our question jar and picked out three questions sent to us that we’re thinking about answering next. When this video is done playing, you’ll get to vote on one. You can choose from: What’s the smallest animal on Earth? How is a flower made? Or who invented the seatbelt?
So submit your vote when the video’s over. We want to hear from all of you watching. There are mysteries all around us. Stay curious, and see you next week!
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Let me know if you need any further modifications!
