I have just became penpals with a person from a Costa Rica in hopes of helping me practice my spanish and to help him learn his english better using Skype. Does anyone have any suggestions on written pieces that we can use to practice both languages? Our last conversation had too many long periods of silence.

Many Costa Ricans are Catholic. If you can use the Bible, both of you might be able to refer to the same stories. I used this method with an Israeli friend who knew the Old Testament and it worked well enough until she learned real English. American baseball is also pretty popular there; I don't know if you're a baseball fan, but that might be worth a try.

That's great.

Have you spoken about your hobbies yet? You could talk about books you like or movies or music. What kinds of TV shows do they have there versus here? Vacations past or upcoming. Politics. Strangest things that are being reported on the news. Once you start getting to know each other, topics will flow more easily.

For something creative, you can each pick something to make up a story about and then swap to rewrite it correctly. For example, you decide you want to write about a dog that becomes president. Make up the story in Spanish and send it to him. He writes one in English about something else and sends it to you. You both read the stories and fix the grammar. Then, you can send them back. Or, you can do something like that but in real time where you pick a topic and one person starts in their language and the other continues in the other language and you go back and forth creating the story. Could be fun.