Formal and Informal Language with Thank You Letters

The holidays are over! Of course, being in Pennsylvania, I had school on Thursday and then a snow day on Friday--not really the smoothest start to the new year. In January I am forever behind where I think I want to be.

But that single Thursday of instruction did let us finish up all of the personal narratives that students have been working on since October, so we can start fresh on Monday. After the holidays, I love taking a break from longer pieces of writing to write thank you letters. These little pieces of writing can provide so much mileage for instruction--formal and informal language, letter form, and addressing envelopes.

This year I've put together a little presentation with examples of formal and informal language. The text boxes don't work properly in the embed and I'm not particularly motivated to fix it right now, but you'll find it downloads just fine.

Formal and Informal Language from Emily Kissner

In our daily sentences, we'll be working on switching back and forth between formal and informal language--lots of fun for kids! Intermediate readers enjoy the humor of controlling their speech and tailoring it to the right situation.

One of my wonderful colleagues suggested adding one of the popular Sprint commercials to our first lesson. (Not all of them are school appropriate, so do be careful if you choose to use them.) The humor in this commercial actually comes from the mismatch between the formal attire of the actors and the informal language they are reading. As we watch it together, students will use whiteboards to record some of the examples of informal language used.




Our work with thank you letters will end with a chilly trip to the post office, which is right down the hill from the school. Each year that I've been doing this students have had less and less experience with actually mailing letters--hardly surprising, of course--and the process of putting the address on the front of the envelope. (Don't even get me started with the problems with placing the stamp!)

If you are writing thank you letters with students, be sure to send a note home to parents asking for stamp donations and the correctly written address of the person to whom students will be writing. I also get parent permission for students to use their home address for the return address. Most parents respond very favorably to this. Students who don't return to the parent letter write to someone at the primary school using our school's return address, which works out quite well.

This video helps students to understand the mail sorting process and appreciate the journey that their letters will undergo:


As I said, you can do a lot of teaching with a simple thank you letter! This quick little unit gets us refreshed and ready for the more rigorous essay writing that we will undertake at the end of the month.

Notes
January homework is ready! Four texts with comprehension questions, vocabulary activities, and open-ended responses. This month's texts are:
-Winter Is...a poem that I wrote when I was feeling rather annoyed with winter. My feelings haven't changed.
-Blizzard Warning!...an informational text about the Northeast blizzard of 1978.
-Happy Australia Day!...an informational text that compares and contrasts Australia Day (January 26) with Independence Day.
-Fairy Bread...a procedural text that tells how to make this Australian specialty. I read about fairy bread while researching Australia Day, found the incredibly simple recipe, and just had to share it. Here is a picture of the fairy bread that I made:

I wasn't sure if I liked it or not, but I had to keep trying it to check. Hmmm....

If you are interested in specific resources for thank you notes, you can find a mini-unit here.

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Thank-You Notes, Part Two

Earlier I wrote about a unit that I planned for teaching students how to write thank-you notes. Now that I've started the unit, I am so happy with how it's going! Parents responded enthusiastically to the letters that I sent home asking for addresses and stamp donations.

And students enjoyed reading about letters from the past. I pulled out some of the old letters that I have on hand (read here about how I used them to teach about inferences). We looked at the letters and talked about how some features have stayed the same, while others have changed. Why do letters still have greetings? Why do we not use hot wax to seal letters anymore? (Thank goodness.)

When it was time to write, students jumped right in. Some of them struggled with the form of letters--we'll work on this in the next few days! Others, though, struggled with the rhetorical task of letter writing. How to express greetings to a grandmother you see every day? How to start out a letter to someone you hardly know?

At the end of class, we shared their writing challenges and successes. For students who were frustrated, I told them, "You are joining a long line of letter writers, through the centuries, who have had trouble with getting started writing a letter." There is something that is so neat about joining a club of writers!

Writing Thank-You Notes

Thank-you notes are one of my least favorite writing genres. I always struggle with expressing my true appreciation in a way that does not sound stiff and over-formal. It's not surprising, then, that I often put off this rhetorical chore.

But thank-you letters are an important genre for students to learn. Even as other forms of writing become less formal, thank-you letters are still required in many situations. I decided that a quick dip into thank-you notes would make a nice transition back to school from the holiday break. 

But, given my own problems with the genre, I decided to do some research before I created the assignment. Why are letters put together as they are? How is the form changing?

I did some searching and found a treasure trove of old letters--the Paston letters, from five hundred years ago. These letters are from various members of a gentry family in England. Margaret Paston, even though she couldn't physically write, still composed many letters to others in her busy household, sharing news, asking questions, taking care of business. Letters from her children had much in common with what children ask of parents today. They are fascinating to read.

 After reading some of these letters, and commentary about them, I knew that I had to share these interesting details with students. I wrote a short article to explain to students how these old letters are similar to the letters of today, and how they are different. My fourth graders wouldn't get very far with the irregular spelling and archaic language of the letters, but I included some snippets of the texts so that they would get a feel for what this kind of writing sounded like.

I didn't stop there. As I was reading the Paston letters, I started thinking about levels of formality in writing. When students write thank-you letters, getting the right tone is essential. Tone is easy for kids to hear in speaking, but harder for them to notice in writing. The correct tone for a thank-you letter to Grandma is going to be different from the tone to use as a thank-you for an interview. To help students start to notice this, I wrote a few example letters using appropriate and inappropriate tones. By the time I was done, I had an entire mini-unit with a writing checklist, compare and contrast article, examples for students to rate, and a rubric.

I posted the entire unit at TeachersPayTeachers:
 http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Thank-You-Letter-Unit