Valentine Letter Writing
Lesson Plan: Teach Students How to Write a Letter
Letter writing and Valentine's Day - they go together. Use this lesson plan to teach about writing letters and the February 14 holiday.
Does anyone write letters these days? Letter writing may be an endangered art, but teaching your students how to write them is still a worthwhile lesson and a great life skill as well. And with February 14 around the corner, a letter writing lesson on a Valentine’s Day theme will combine two great ideas into one lesson plan.
Lesson Introduction
To begin, you may want to talk with your students about writing letters: see how many do and how many have received a letter recently. In this day of email, they’ve all probably received emails, so be sure to discuss the differences between email and a “real” letter. Have they written or received thank you letters? Do their grandparents live at a distance and write to them? Have they received post cards from friends on vacation? These are all great examples of letters that your students may have experience with.
Stories about Letter Writing
You may also want to read a story to the class about writing letters. Here are a few that you can try, depending upon your grade level to set the stage:
- A Letter to Amy by Ezra Jack Keats
- Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Cleary
- Dear Brother by Frank Asch and Vladimir Vasilevich Vagin
- The Gardener by Sarah Stewart
What makes a letter a letter?
Continue your lesson plan with a discussion of the main parts of a letter. You may want to make a chart of these parts, or draw a big letter on the chalkboard and fill in each. Use your English textbook as a style guide, or include these parts:
- Date
- Salutation or Greeting,
- Body of the letter
- Closing,
Who should we write to?
After instruction on these parts, challenge the students to brainstorm who they’d like to write a letter to and what the letter might contain. Let them work in groups as they do this and then create a class brainstorming chart to help those with fewer ideas.
Love Letters
Since Valentine’s Day is nearly here, you may even want to call these “love letters” and parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters and good friends would all be excellent recipients of these.
To make your student’s letters special, you may want to let students use fancy stationery or colored pens to write their special letters. Be sure they do a rough draft first – no computer word processing here – just great handwritten letters!
You can even have your students’ letters remailed for Valentine’s Day through the Loveland Valentine Remailing Program.
See also: Stargazing: Lesson Ideas
