Thinking of the first days of school? Here I share a ‘letter to my teacher’ activity for teens in middle school and high school (11-18). It can be used with younger or older students and the template I provide is fully editable for customising to your needs.
Why Ask Students To Write A Letter?
For me, as a middle school humanities teacher in an international school, I never know who will walk through my classroom door. Even once the demographic information has been shared with me, I may well find out that the Iranian-American student’s preferred first language is actually French because he grew up in Algeria due to his parents’ job. I may find that the Ghanaian student identifies herself as a die-hard Anime fan because her best friend from the international school she attended in Poland was Japanese-Indian and introduced her to the genre. In other words, I can’t make many (any?) generalisations or assumptions about how my learners construct their identities, so I need to find out.
As I also need to get a sample of writing from students as early as possible in the school year, asking them to write a letter doubles up as a baseline assessment too. Rather than adding to students’ workload outside the classroom, I tell them we will be doing the letter in the next lesson and give them the prompts so they can start thinking about what they’d like to include. In the following lesson, I then allocate half an hour for them to produce a response and we’re done. I ask them to demonstrate their best writing skills, but I emphasise that the most important thing is that I get to know them as people. While this can contribute to my understanding of their skills as one data point, there will plenty more to cross-reference it with.
This activity is not time-consuming, is low-stress for students, and gives me insight into what is important to them in terms of identity, learning, classroom culture, and much more.
What’s more is that I can use the information they share to find points of connection and show students I care about them as individuals. A student never fails to light up with a smile when I ask them how their specific hobby, friend, sibling, [insert other important feature of their life] is doing. They know I’ve read the letter and taken note, so I would like to think it contributes to our positive classroom culture and relationships.
Ready-To-Go Editable Handout
Think you’d like to give it a try? I highly recommend it. Use the 10-second form below to sign up for access to the vault of freebies I put together for my subscribers. Within you’ll find this letter template as well as other time-saving resources from my culturally-sustaining, identity-affirming classroom.
Easy ways to connect with students and build community? We’ve got this!
