M5 English Lesson

Through January M5 will be raising money for the Community Support field trip, on which we organise a camp, raise money and take a blind school on the camp. This has become a sucessful part of the high school outdoor curriculum. As part of this, and linking to the school curriculum, the students are learning persuasive writing. In this they had to write a charity appeal letter, which will be used in their fund-raising.

We were fortunate enough this year to be visited by Becky Calder who works for a charity in the UK and has extensive experience writing appeal letters. Her work is used on the BBC radio in the UK and she has been asked to run training for other charities in the UK.

Becky is the Head of Individual Giving for the charity ‘Toybox’ (https://www.toybox.org.uk/) which works raising money to help street children in South America. In the last 12 years she has worked for OXFAM, New Zealand and the Stroke Association, UK. Becky came in to talk to the students of M5 on the techniques that can be used in charity appeal writing and how to make the letters as effective as possible. She handed out examples of her work and explained how to use different language devices and techniques to enhance the students letters. We were very lucky this year, as Becky was travelling in Thailand at the time. In the past years we have used the google hangouts as a tool for this lesson.