Fan Letter Project

MARTIN JACKSON

I have been fortunate during my time on the JET program to have worked on some fun and exciting projects at school. The most rewarding project for me has been my third-year students’ fan mail project.

For this project, the students had to write fan mail letters to people around the world who inspire them. Many of the people the students wrote to will be well known to you. Popular choices included Michael Jordan, Emma Watson, Ed Sheeran and Johnny Depp. Some students also wrote to less well-known individuals who had inspired them. These included talented musicians, designers, and authors and even some their teachers too!

Later on, we were lucky to receive many replies to these letters. These came from Michael Jordan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, LeBron James and Austin Mahone, as well as others. Many of these replies included signed photographs too. One reply, from the Pokémon designer James Turner, even included an illustration of my student’s favourite Pokémon! We also received replies by email too, from

people like Professor Yuval Noah Harari, the best-selling author of Sapiens and Homo Deus.

How then did my school organize this project and what was the process involved? It’s possible you too may get to work on a similar project with your students someday. If so, I hope the following is of use to you. for the students to reach a decision and also made the project more manageable too.

The first thing I and my JTEs did was provide our students with a shortlist of celebrity candidates. This made it easier Following this, the students wrote their draft letters in class with help from their JTEs and me. After these drafts were proofread, the students wrote their final letters. Following this, I then had to find the fan mail addresses of the people the students chose. Most of these addresses were available online via websites such as Fanbiz.com. For those who did not have

FAN LETTER PROJECT fan mail addresses online, I had to send emails either to them or their agents. I also kept a record of who the students wrote to and their contact details in a separate Excel spreadsheet. After finishing this phase of the project, I then a drafted cover letter to include with the student’s fan mail. I would recommend doing this, as it provides context for the person receiving the fan mail.

With these tasks completed, the last thing to do was to compile all the letters and send them on their way. We made sure to include return envelopes when doing so, to make it easier for the person receiving the fan mail to respond. The school fan mail project was a lot of fun to work on and produced very rewarding results for students and teachers alike. I was glad to see my students receive mail from their favourite celebrities and to see how excited some of my colleagues got too! I also had the wonderful opportunity to write letters of response myself, to those students who had written fan mail letters to me! The project was also a great opportunity for me to learn more about my students and to work on improving my writing and research skills, too.

As of the time of writing, my school has continued to receive extra responses to last year’s fan mail project. We recently received a handwritten letter from Megumi Kanda, a famous trombonist, and more letters from MJ too! My current third-year students are now working on this project themselves, and I can’t wait to see how this year’s project turns out for them.

I hope some of what I have written here inspires you to convince your JTEs to try a fan mail project at your school! I hope it is also of use to those of you who are or will work on such a project in the future.

If you have questions or feedback about this article, please get in touch.

**All photos used provided by Martin Jackson