Thanks very much.
I've landed on creating a "faux" group in the People App, and if I want to send a note to that group/distribution list, I must select that person/contact within the People App, and click "send email." For the group, I used 8kids: the email ID's go in the email field, separated by semicolons. I don't know if there's an upper limit to the characters in that field -- certainly 8 email ID's fit.
Note, I'm looking for the most straightforward approach, since this is really for my 83-year old mother's use of email to her 8 children. She's transitioning now from Windows XP and Yahoo! email to a new PC, Windows 8, metro tiles, mail app, people app, new printer, etc. It's hard to find a good answer to her perfectly reasonable question, "why can't I just type 8kids in the To: line?"
So this new approach satisfies the "send a new email to all the kids" capability. Not sure what I'll do for "forward a note to all the kids..."!
Anyhow, thanks very much.