This week the 5th and 6th grade have been hard at work writing letters for their “Borderless World” theme. After writing their draft letter in Japanese we started to think about the best way to write a persuasive letter in English, it was now that everyone’s English skills came into their own.

First of all we looked at an example letter that was written by a group of 4th grade elementary students in the UK to raise money for a cancer charity. Using the example letter as a base we started off not by reading it but by just looking at the general layout to try and imagine what the letter was all about.

First of all we noticed that there was something written above the main letter…what could it be?

“The address!” said one student.

“But there are two!” questions another.

“Maybe one is the senders address and the other is the recipients address!” suggests someone else.

Without realising it the students had hit on one of the most important points about writing a letter in English. The address should always be written at the top of the page along with the date.

We then continued to look for interesting points which was when someone noticed that there is a sentence only written in capital letters.

ST DEREKS NEEDS YOUR HELP!

But why is it all in capital letters….?

“I can see the word HELP!” notices one eagle-eyed student, “maybe they want the recipient of the letter to help them.”

“It makes you want to read it because of the capital letters!”

We agreed that we need to make our letter eye-catching and memorable for the reader so we decided to imitate this part of the letter.

We then looked at the second sentence and broke down the meaning into smaller, easier to understand chunks. When the students looked at the sentence they realized that it is a summary of the entire project:

“On March 28th, pupils at St Derek’s Primary school are running a day of fundraising activities, to raise money for cancer relief.

This says when, who, what and why the school are running event, so much information in just one sentence, we could definitely use this for our own project. Using everyone’s vocabulary we managed to make the whole sentence ourselves.

And so as the day wore on we put together our letter sentence by sentence and the students completed their first letter in English, nice job guys! There were some difficult vocabulary which we had to look up but the letter is almost entirely their own.

Have a look!

Next we had to think about the layout of our letter. We looked at a total of 5 examples and debated the good and bad points of each letter. We asked the question, “Which letter would you most like to receive?” Which do you prefer?

As expected opinion was split but everyone agreed that the handwritten letters gave a much better impression than the computer typed ones, some students liked the pictures; others liked the simple border around the main letter. The students agreed to write their letters in their own individual style and make sure that their handwriting is as neat as possible.

As Golden Week approaches the students have the difficult and time consuming task of writing out 3 copies of the letter, ready to be sent after the holiday to countries all over the world. While we are waiting for a response of course we will not be wasting our time, the video letter is just waiting to be made!