Date and file copies of letters written by students in students' writing folders. Help students understand that letters represent meaningful communication with a genuine audience. Encourage emerging writers to combine drawings and print in their letters. Encourage students to share experiences, thoughts, comments and questions with their audience. What Students Learn about Language Purposes and audiences determine what is written and how it is written.
Writing is used to communicate with others for various purposes.
Knowledge of conventional spelling and syntactic patterns, use of punctuation and capitalization, and legible handwriting increase the effectiveness of written communication. Adaptations and Applications Students can create greeting cards, invitations and thank-you notes. Messages and letters to classmates can be encouraged by providing individual mail boxes. Teachers could display a written message to the class every morning. Class messages could be structured as modified cloze passages .