Dear Me Letter Activity

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.

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.

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.

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!