Dear Me Letter Activity

in #steemiteducation6 years ago (edited)

As a teacher, there are a couple of things that I want to do at the beginning of the year. I want to get to know my students and build relationships with them, I want to start teaching the systems they need to know to be successful in my classroom, and I want to do things that are fun or interesting before we really delve into the content. As an adult, I enjoy doing the activity along with my students as well- I like having an opportunity to discuss what my life is like at the beginning of the year, my goals, and at the end of the year reflecting back on who I was then, and who I am now. Reflecting on the past is an important skill to learn, and one tool that I use to teach this skill to my students is the "Dear Me Letter". Essentially, students write a letter to themselves in the future, from the present. I have my students do this at the beginning of the school year and save it for them to read at the end of the school year, then they write one that I save until they graduate. Last year, I handed the valedictorian for the class her letter, and she told me that she had said she set a goal as a sophomore to be valedictorian! There may have been some tears shed over that. I have had students who dropped out, come back into the building to retrieve their letters.


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I do this activity to teach a number of systems that they will use throughout the year in my classroom- how to turn in an assignment, gateway criteria when turning in a paper (I do not accept it without a minimum amount of writing and effort), working quietly for a specified amount of time, and affirmative checks. The payoff for this assignment does not really come until the end of the year, however, when I hand the students their letters. This also, I think, teaches them about long-term planning- that even if they don't get instant gratification from completed work, that there is still satisfaction to be gained.


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There are two methods for doing this: hard-copy and digital. I've been doing this hard-copy with my students for the last 4 years, but at the end of the this year I switched schools, so I decided to do the final one digitally.
Dear Me Letter Instructions (hard-copy)
Supplies needed: paper and writing utensil (if you have a preferred one that students should use, this is a great time to make sure they have it, and know that you won't accept work written using anything else)

  1. Have students get out paper and a writing utensil
  2. Instruct students to write at least one page, label the assignment in the preferred way, and depending on students age, how to format a letter. Teachers may provide a model and support students in whatever way appropriate by providing sentence stems or guiding questions.
  3. Give students time to to write (10-15 minutes is generally enough)
  4. As students finish, check to make sure they meet the minimum requirements for the assignment before they hand it in. Collect the letters and keep them in a folder or file until the end of the year, or for the next four years if you are holding on to it until they graduate.
    Optional- some students prefer to keep their letters private, or include personal information in them. I offer them the choice of folding the letter so I can't read it (and when I do the check for the minimum, I have them turn it over so I can see through the back at the length but not be concerned about the content). Some have stapled their letters to insure that it was not tampered with! This helps build relationships with students- they understand that if these are tampered with, then they can't trust me as a teacher.

If you have the means to do this digitally, I would recommend it. Automating the process puts a lot less pressure on the teacher to keep the letters organized and distributed. Plus, you can teach your students any systems that you want to develop surrounding computer use- how to distribute computers, how to collect them, what resources are available while they are on the computer, etc. The best resource I've found is Futureme.

futureme.png

You do have to have your students sign up for an account in order to have their letters sent- I recommend having them use their school sign-ins and passwords. Also, you might have them write the letter in google docs or another word processing program, and copy+paste it over, just in case. Kids really shut down when they feel like their work has been lost for any reason- that would be a terrible way to start the year! Also, you could do a check for length (or any other requirement) before they copy it over, so that might be helpful as well. My favorite part about this website is the ability to schedule a specific date to receive the email- I suggest having a date picked before requesting your students to complete the assignment.

Even if you don't have students, this is a fun activity to do. It might also make for a great steemit post!

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I love this technique, @sunravelme!

I do something similar thing for my own creative manifestation process. It would be so cool to see them doing this in cursive (in the light of so many trivializing the art of cursive penmanship).

That would make for a cool steemit post Jakob! I write one every year along with my students as a model- I'll have to see if I can still access any of them to post. I think this would be a great activity to have students practice their cursive- a lot of writing skills can be practiced, from grammar to using devices to writing a narrative....

Yeah, most definitely! I may consider doing that to personalize some of my regular work about this.

Spellwork tells us much about the curse. What I've learned in the hang and the twist brings much to the mind with a bounce and a catch.

Have fun!

ladida

I like this exercise/writing prompt & can see how it would get students to reflect. In fact, I think I attempted something like it, on Steemit, not too, too long ago...

Meantime, my post today is kind of the inverse: a letter to my past self/selves (in an attempt to heal/move on).

Peace ✌🏼

I think that's also a wonderful exercise! I've read a couple of people who wrote to their 16 year old self in order to come to grips with their past mistakes and traumas. We've talked before about the healing power of writing, and I think that's an excellent example!

Writing myself sane(r) day by day, my friend, or trying to... I don’t know what I’d do without it; writing is the poor (wo)man’s therapy!

what a wonderful way to encourage students to learn and write! I think goals are something that are hard to define and conceive, especially when you are young, because kids are spongie and tend to absorb all the values of the family friends and peers. trying to define what THEY want is to me a monumental task!

Even now i have a very difficult time defining my goals, because to me goals are like clouds, amorphous and shifting and never really well envisioned. as soon as you get to know one facet, it drifts away, and the goal with it.

Spongie is a good word for it for sure! I think goal setting is hard for most people at any age- that's kind of what's cool about this! I also love when the kids note how much their handwriting had changed or if they were friends with different people. A lot of them had never really noted how much they changed over the course of the year- one kid mentioned that they thought they were a completely different person! It allows some internal reflection.

I like this idea. I'm always trying to think of good ice breaker activities to do, and this one is not only fun, but can help them get a sense of accountability as well. Thanks for sharing!

Absolutely! As I plan for my new curriculum, I'll probably post other activities that I do as well

I wish I'd had more teachers like you.

❤️ This makes my heart happy

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