The Five Year Letter - A Goodbye Gift to Your Students

Dear Teachers,

Normally, it's our public speaking / reading projects and our vocabulary program that our graduating students speak so fondly of, but this is the last of our writing projects for our middle school students and easily our most popular. The concept is based around the students viewing this moment in their lives as a time capsule about themselves. Fifty questions entice the students into considering their personality, goals, hardships, triumphs and predictions for their future - and that of their friends. The envelopes that they place all of their answers into becomes the capsule that allows them to send gift cards, greeting cards, music cds, flash drives and old classroom notes to themselves in the five years to come. Even parents contribute by offering letters as to what they see in their child at this point in time. int

Our students regularly turn out their most voluminous compositions for this project because the focus is, of course, themselves – and NOBODY is more fascinating to an eighth grader - or high school student - than that. This is a great unit to close the year with before you send your charges off into the great unknown.