Letter to your 10 year old self
Putting words to feelings | Suitable for 13-18 year olds
A letter to you
If you could write to your younger self, what would you say?
Would you try to change your future for the better?
Would you pass on your wisdom and try to improve yourself?
Or would you try to make the wider world a better place?
Video by TheSeventySixer โ embedded & hosted by Youtube.
Thinking ideas
Think about your life as a ten-year-old. What has changed? How have you grown?
What challenges and setbacks have you faced since then?
If you could choose three things to say to your ten-year-old self to help make your future life better, what would you say?
Discussion ideas
- Can the right words at the right time change the course of someoneโs life?
- Have your dreams changed since you were 10? How? Why?
- Is looking back healthy or harmful?
- When you have written your letter, be honest with yourself: how do you think your 10-year-old self would react to reading it?
Writing ideas
For your opening lines, think about tone. Donโt assume the younger you would appreciate being told how to live their life. How would you grab your younger selfโs attention? How would you earn their respect?
Offer specific, rather than vague, advice. Pose questions. Focus on the concrete rather than the metaphorical. Tell yourself a story through your advice.
Draw the reader in slowly, so the key advice feels like a plot resolution. Make your most important piece of advice as powerful as an unforgettable story ending.
Teaching ideas
- Model writing using a personal and reflective tone.
- Discuss how to use the first person when sharing your feelings.
- This Hallmark card writer offers some great advice on expressing a peronal touch.
- This article from the Guardian reflects on the lost art of letter writing.
Resources
- Listen to 7 Years by Lukas Graham. Think about how what we are told about life by adults and how accurate or useful it is. What advice would you give to a generation younger than you? Do you think they find it useful?
- You could also listen to Please Read The Letter by Robert Plant.
- Read Dear Me: A Letter to My Sixteen-Year-Old Self, edited by Joseph Galliano, which contains letters to themselves by Stephen Fry, Annie Lennox, Paul OโGrady, Jackie Collins, Fay Weldon, Alan Carr, Peter Kay, Debbie Harry, Brenda Blethyn , Jonathan Ross, Liz Smith, Will Young, Alison Moyet, Rosanne Cash, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Yoko Ono, Emma Thompson and more.
- Also, have a look at these letters that celebrities wrote to their younger selves, including Stephen King, Alice Cooper, James Woods and Suze Orman.
- Maya Angelouโs letter to her younger self is a must-read.
- If your students read their letters aloud in class, enliven the session with some sound effects!
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Letter to your 10 year old self
Seeing things differently
Photo by Thalia Ruiz on Unsplash
Wax seals were used to stop people from opening someone elseโs mail. If the letter arrived with a broken seal, it would be clear it had been opened and possibly read. Some regimes and countries still read peopleโs mail. How do you feel about this? Are there any situations were this is the right thing to do? Or, should we be able to send letters and expect privacy?
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