NAME: You Inspired Me Awards Nominations 

BACKGROUND/RATIONALE: We explored numerous ideas, thoughts and suggestions during this unit on the writing process.  I am targeting high school students, preferably grades 11 and 12, because these are the students about to enter college, where your writing is held under much more scrutiny.  We also explored many different types of writing styles.  This assignment will help students develop their persuasion skills.  Writing a good argument with evidence to support it will be essential in college and this assignment is designed to help refine these skills.

GOAL: To help students refine their persuasion skills and learn how to provide evidence to support an idea or opinion, while helping to develop good writing skills.

LOGISTICS: Our school is hosting the 1st ever You Inspire Me Awards next month.  We are seeking nominations from students at the school.  In order to nominate someone, you must submit an essay describing how this person has inspired you and why the awards committee should give this person the award.  You are to think of the ONE person that has had an impact on your life.  This should be a person that has inspired you to make the decisions that you've made thus far in your life and support your every endeavor.  Write an essay stating 3 ways in which this person has been most inspirational to you and 3 reasons why the awards committee should give the award to this person.

EVALUATION:  A successful essay will meet the criteria outlined above while providing ample evidence for this person's nomination.  A successful essay will also have little to no grammatical and spelling errors. It will be clear from reading this essay that the person being nominated is truly deserving of the You Inspire Me Award.

All other essays will fall below the standards outlined above by either not providing enough evidence or failing to fully support their claim.  Also, an unsuccessful essay will have obvious spelling and grammatical errors.
 

NAME: You Inspire Me Awards Nominations Permission

BACKGROUND/RATIONALE: This assignment will familiarize students with electronic mail (email) while developing writing skills.

GOAL: see above

LOGISTICS:  In this assignment, you are to send an email to the person you nominated for the You Inspire Me Awards.  In the email you should first explain to the person what the awards are about and then give the person the 3 reasons for your nomination.  You should finish up your email by explaining to the person why this nomination is so important and why it is important that they accept the nomination.  

For those of you unfamiliar with email, go to the Web site (http://sites.unc.edu/iteach) for more information.  For those of you without email accounts, go to the Web site (http://www.yahoo.com) and set up an account.

EVALUATION:  A successful essay will clearly state the reasons for nomination while explaining to this person their importance to the student's life with little to no grammatical errors.

All others will fall below the expectations outlined above.