If you teach a career readiness course, you know how important cover letters are in the modern job market. Many employers won’t even look at a job application unless the candidate includes a cover letter explaining their qualifications and passion for the position.
And yet, when it comes to middle school, it’s almost impossible to find appropriate activities your kids can complete that will teach them the necessary skills to write great cover letters. This can be tremendously frustrating. After all, you don’t want your students to experience a slew of rejections because they never learned how to properly write a letter.
As a career readiness curriculum developer, we know how hard it can be to find material for middle schoolers, and in response, we’ve gathered together a list of some of the best activities you can use to teach your kids the right way to write a cover letter.
In this article, you’ll discover four of the top cover letter activities you can use in your middle school career readiness course:
- Writing a Cover Letter from OLRC
- Resume, Cover Letter, and Interview Unit from The SuperHERO Teacher
- Career Readiness Bundle from Apples and Bananas Education
- Cover Letter Lesson Plan from Study.com
By the end of this article, you’ll have a better sense of each of these activities, so you can choose the best one to fit within your course.
1. Writing a Cover Letter from OLRC
The Ohio Literacy Resource Center (OLRC) of Kent State University is an organization dedicated to providing support to literacy programs throughout Ohio.
Though their efforts are often dedicated to teaching adults, some of the learning resources developed through their ABLE Initiative work well for students of almost any age.
One of these resources is a lesson called Writing a Cover Letter that can be found on OLRC’s Eureka! database.
This career readiness lesson plan is a good place to start when it comes to teaching your middle schoolers how to write cover letters. If you just want the activity itself, though, you can pluck it from the lesson document and leave the rest alone.
What Does This Cover Letter Activity Look Like?
The Writing a Cover Letter activity is simple, well-rounded, and flexible enough to fit in with most middle school career readiness courses. It is divided into four steps:
- Introduce students to the concept of a cover letter and what it means.
- Go over each of the sections of a cover letter, including introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion, and what each should include.
- Have students write their own cover letter for a specific job they have in mind. This job will most likely be one they make up--though you could always have them write the cover letter as if they were applying to their dream job!
- Lastly, have students edit and revise their cover letter, focusing on spelling, punctuation, and other standard writing conventions. Once they’re done, they can produce a final version on a computer.
This activity may be simple on its own, but there’s a lot you can do with it to spice it up for your kids. In many ways, it’s a perfect cover letter activity that you can take and run with to make it your own!
How Much Does This Cover Letter Activity Cost?
The Writing a Cover Letter activity is free on OLRC’s Eureka! database. Just follow the links and you should be able to download the PDF containing the lesson without issue.
If you’re looking for a quick, easy, and free activity or lesson plan to help you teach your middle schoolers how to write cover letters, then this might be the choice for you.
2. Resume, Cover Letter, and Interview Unit from The SuperHERO Teacher
Teachers Pay Teachers (TpT) is a digital marketplace that sells thousands of educational resources for instructors teaching almost any age range, Pre-K to adult education.
You can use this marketplace to buy resources for most classes you might teach, as there are hundreds of providers who use Teachers Pay Teachers as a platform to sell lesson plans and activities they develop.
One of the most well-known providers on TpT is The SuperHERO Teacher, who sells assignments, lesson plans, and projects for students of many different age groups, including a Resume, Cover Letter, and Interview Unit.
What Does This Cover Letter Activity Look Like?
The Resume, Cover Letter, and Interview Unit is split into 15 pages, and comes with assignment sheets, templates, graphic organizers, PowerPoints quizzes, and activities, each relating to resumes, cover letters, and job interviews.
There’s a lot of career readiness content to pick from here, in other words, and because this bundle was designed for grades 7-12, it should fit perfectly in with your middle schoolers.
There is one cover letter activity in the bundle, however, that’s particularly engaging. For this activity, your students will:
- Assume the role of hiring managers in a company, real or fictional.
- Read the resumes and cover letters of three candidates.
- Collaborate with others to determine which of the three candidates they would hire, based on the information provided in the letters.
With the role play and critical thought involved here, this activity provides students with a lot of opportunity to have fun with their cover letter lesson. And there are so many ways to customize it to better fit your course!
How Much Does This Cover Letter Activity Cost?
The Resume, Cover Letter, and Interview Unit from The SuperHERO Teacher costs $8.00.
If you’re looking for an effective, engaging cover letter activity that will fit just right with your middle schoolers, it’s hard to go wrong with this product.
3. Career Readiness Bundle from Apples and Bananas Education
Apples and Bananas Education is another prominent curriculum provider on Teachers Pay Teachers. They have hundreds of educational products available on their market page, including worksheets, lesson plans, and presentations that cover topics ranging from algebra to psychology.
One of the products they sell is a Career Readiness Bundle, which includes resources for topics like cover letters, resumes, and mock interviews.
Though intended for high schoolers, the activities and assignments present within this bundle are flexible enough to be adapted quite easily for middle school.
What Does This Cover Letter Activity Look Like?
The Career Readiness Bundle is a 21-page document containing worksheets, activities, projects, and unit plans dedicated to topics like resumes, cover letters, and job interviews.
One of the main activities in the bundle has students go through a mock job application where they:
- Select an entry-level position they’d like to apply to.
- Write a resume and cover letter that will make their application stand out for the job.
- Participate in a mock interview where the teacher assumes the role of the hiring manager and sits each student down to interview them for the positions they have chosen.
Though this bundle is intended for high schoolers, many regard its material as appropriate for almost any age, so it should fit well with middle schoolers to help prepare them for those first jobs they seek out.
Just as well, this bundle has a reputation for being particularly engaging, and not requiring a whole lot of preparation to fit into most courses.
How Much Does This Cover Letter Activity Cost?
The Career Readiness Bundle from Apples and Bananas Education costs only $5.00 for its 21 pages of content.
If you’re looking for a well-rounded, flexible, and engaging job application and cover letter activity, this choice might be right for you.
4. Cover Letter Lesson Plan from Study.com
Study.com is a digital learning platform and resource provider that helps teach millions of people every year all sorts of subjects, from history, to math, to the humanities, and more.
Though much of their video content is only available via purchasing a subscription, some of their teaching materials are freely available on their website.
One such resource is their Cover Letter Lesson Plan, a 1-2 hour lesson and activity where students analyze other cover letters and eventually produce their own.
What Does This Cover Letter Activity Look Like?
The Cover Letter Lesson Plan provides learning objectives, vocabulary, instructions for teaching, and an activity students can complete to practice writing cover letters.
The practice activity takes place after the lesson, so that students have a grasp on the general outline of a cover letter. It then has students:
- Reflect on any experience they have with cover letters.
- Brainstorm a list of relevant skills and experiences they could include on a cover letter.
- Write a cover letter by creating an outline with all the necessary components, and then filling it in with their list of brainstormed ideas.
For this activity, it’s important to get your students thinking critically about which of their skills and experiences would best fit in with the position they’re applying to. You can provide a list of such positions for your students to select from, or have them come up with their own.
It’s also important to note that the instructional video accompanying the Cover Letter Lesson Plan is unfortunately locked behind a subscription. However, even without it, the rest of the available free material is robust enough to provide solid structure to your cover letter unit.
How Much Does This Cover Letter Activity Cost?
You can find the Cover Letter Lesson Plan for free on Study.com’s website.
However, if you want access to premium features like the instructional video, you’ll have to pay for a subscription to Study.com. The Teacher plan costs $59.99 a month, but includes many benefits, including free access for up to 250 students.
If you simply need a quick and accessible cover letter activity for your middle schoolers, then finding this lesson plan for free on Study.com would likely serve your classroom well.
However, if you need a more robust career readiness curriculum, it might be worth it to purchase a subscription to Study.com so that you have complete access to their materials.
So What Comes After the Cover Letter?
Writing the perfect cover letter is an important step your students must take if they hope to get their foot in the door at most companies. However, with few resources available to teach these skills to middle schoolers, it can be disheartening trying to prepare your kids for their futures. They need to learn this stuff as early as they can, after all.
In this article, you’ve found some of the best activities out there when it comes to teaching middle schoolers how to write cover letters. If you use the activities well, your kids will be well on their way to becoming cover letter masters.
But in many ways, the cover letter is just the first step to landing a job. It will help your kids stand out among the crowd, but the next biggest step is learning to succeed in the interview itself.
If you need an activity to help your middle schoolers nail their future job interviews, download a Free Job Interview Role Play Activity. It’s an engaging, educational activity that will help your kids hone the interview skills they need to succeed.
