Year 8 have been working on improving their letter presentation skills as part of the ICT learning at Lansdowne School. Mr. Peters has been helping the pupils to think about the different techniques that we can use in Word to help make our letters look professional.
We started off this learning by first holding a class discussion about the importance of official letters or documents. The pupils were shown how these need to be different from a personal letter as they are putting across an official message.
Examples were then shared on the ICT whiteboard. The Year 8 pupils were able to point out some of the features that we could observe in an official letter. These included the address of the sender, and the correct use of punctuation.
Mr. Peters then played around with the design and layout of an official letter. The font sizes were changed, as well as the colour and style of font. The pupils were asked to comment on the impact that this had on the tone of the letter. It was suggested that it makes the letter seem less important as it looks very informal.
The ICT task for the Year 8 pupils was to type up a short passage from one of their favourite books. The students were then asked to use various features in Word to make the letter appear as official looking as possible.
This work was then shared at the end of the ICT session. Suggestions for improvement and corrections were made. This work will continue over the next couple of weeks to include images or diagrams being used in the official letters.