This article introduces an assignment that will help instructors effectively teach media grammar and convergence to their students. Hybrid letter writing (HBL) is an experiential learning assignment where students learn about media grammar and convergence by experiencing it. The current modus operandi of teaching convergence and media grammar is…

Maximizing classroom time to include meaningful content-based learning with fun engaging activities that simultaneously challenge and encourage students is a hallmark of a successful school day. This article shares one instructional approach that does a model eliciting activity (MEA). A MEA is a real-world, problem-based scenario framed around a…

Courses: This unit-level teaching assignment was designed for courses on rhetoric, persuasion, professional communication, public speaking, and business communication. Objectives: By completing this activity, students should be able to: (1) identify and research a specific job, scholarship, or award they'd like to pursue within the next six…

Instructional tips help educators carry out recommendations contained in IES Educator's Practice Guides. The tips, based on a practice guide authored by Steve Graham, Alisha Bollinger, Carol Booth Olson, Catherine D'Aoust, Charles MacArthur, Deborah McCutchen, and Natalie Olinghouse, translate these recommendations into actionable approaches that…

Written by experienced language educator Paula Patrick, this 96-page book offers detailed guidelines to help new classroom teachers gain confidence and direction as they begin their teaching careers. In addition to step-by-step strategies for everything from classroom organization to navigating Back-to-School Night, the book includes sample lesson…

This article presents four Idea-Sparkers that were submitted by Jason McKinney, a graduate student at Southern Mississippi University and a 1st-grade teacher at Pisgah Elementary in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. First is entitled, "Raceway in the Classroom." This activity can help increase children's fluency and ability to identify numerous…

Discusses the following problems that many authors of young people's books share: (1) financial expense involved in responding to letters; (2) mail sent to the wrong address, with illegible return addresses, or without accompanying, stamped envelopes; (3) predictable contents, such as requests for information, material demands, or expectations of…

Facilitates students' writing for completeness, objectivity, and tact with an assignment to write a memo or letter to two or more people with different interests in the information. (MS)

Contains 10 points of advice for those who want letters of recommendation from teachers. (JD)

A brief look at teaching students how to write letters and at using letters as instructional tools in the junior high and high school English classroom. (RL)

Offers a revisionist view of business letter writing that emphasizes content and real world contact over form and punctuation. (TB)

Notes that by exploring Depression-era teens' letter writing, language arts teachers can enjoy more fruitful uses of nonfiction with their students. Discusses how reading, analyzing, and responding to the letters could help minimize the widening gap between the 1930s and the twenty-first century. Concludes that researching everyday Americans'…

Suggests ways of developing student skills in writing letters of request. (RL)

Describes a sales letter lecture and writing assignment in which students write sales letters on real products of personal interest using product information from "Consumer Reports" magazine. (SR)

Eleanor Roosevelt could be called a Superstar First Lady. In the era when women's suffrage was first being exercised, she was "pushing the envelope" of what the President's wife, and women in general, might be expected to do in civic life. She wrote syndicated columns for magazines and newspapers, the most famous of which was entitled "My Day," a…