Dear Pauline,

Thanks for your letter, which I received last week. It was nice hearing about all the stuff you and your brother got as Christmas presents! Did you have snow? We did here in London.

Anyway, I really have to tell you about what we’re doing in English. Our teacher, Miss Brook, is teaching us about ancient Egypt! It sounds so cool, and I’d love to visit there one day! (Blah, blah, blah covering all the things you are supposed to be discussing).

So, are you doing anything new in school? How’s history going? Is your teacher still giving you bad marks for spelling?

Hope to hear from you soon,

Yours,

Louise

Because you’re writing to a friend, you need to use a much less formal writing style. No one would write what you have written in a letter, unless they were writing to someone like their Aunt that they don’t see very often! Write it in the way you would post it as a forum message, and then tidy up some of the spelling and grammar (but not too much!).

The point of your assignment is to show you that different writing styles are needed in different situations. So go on, write that letter to me, in response to a letter I wrote to you last week, saying that it snowed, I had a great holiday with a new bike and my brother (he’s 4) got a play workbench with all the tools. Oh, and I hate my History teacher, because he deducts marks for my bad spelling (I used a spell checker to write my letter to you, so don’t pull me up on anything!).
References :

this is the question:
WRITING A LETTER (personal recount)

Write a letter to your friend to tell him or her about english lesson you had on ancient Egypt
In your letter, you should use the following points & add in other relevant details

- Activities carry out during English lesson:
- The most interesting activities and explain why.
- 3 interesting things you have learned
- how you felt about the lesson

You are advised to write between 200 and 250 words.

My essay:

The second English lesson I had after a long holiday was on ancient Egypt. Given the opportunity, visiting Egypt may certainly be enticing because they had a unique culture. I was very excited because I did not have to do my own research to find out the information on life in ancient Egypt. Our English teacher, Miss Brook showed us a powerpoint slide of an overview of ancient Egypt. I listened attentively to what she said. The first slide showed the "Book of the Dead". It did not look like what I thought, the book was colourful. Miss Brook asked us to do a mind-map of what had been taught, for examples the great pyramid Sphinx, religion, social class, etc. I learned a new word such as ‘hieroglyphics’. Miss Brook also conducted a short quizzes to recap the things that had been taught. Actually, I knew all the answer but I did not shout it out because I am quite a shy person.

Miss Brook presented a powerpoint slide about hieroglyphics. Hieroglyphics was a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that contained a combination of logographic and alphabet elements. We went into more details on it such as the Egyptian did not really good at vowels so they replaced ‘E’ as ‘I’ due to the similar pronounciation. They were interesting because they used picture to describe things rather than alphabet. To engange us more, Miss Brook conducted a game called ‘Text Twist using Hieroglyphics’. We were given a chart containing hieroglyph and which letter it represent. We were working in pairs, my friend was the one who deciphered the hieroglyph into letters. I tried to form as many words as possible although that day I was tired so I might not be able to think clearly. In the end, our group won the second prize with score of 75. Before the end of the lesson, I did a reflection worksheet. I really found it useful because I learnt to do reflection on things that had been taught.

In the third lesson, I was even more curious and enthusiastic about the lesson that was going to be taught. It was about mummification. Before Miss Brook told us the steps taken in the process of mummification, she asked us to appoint a representatives from each group to come out to the front to write down the steps. We were given 5 minutes to discuss among ourselves.Luckily, I already read it in Internet the day before. Surprisingly, my answers matched with Miss Brook’s one. The next day, she showed us three different video about the process of mummification. It was really captivating. Out of three, I liked the first one about Herakleides.

I felt that the best lessons was on mummification especially the quizzes. When one person from our group walking to the front, time was running out so I quickly jotted down the steps that I remembered from the articles that I had read, on a piece of paper and handed in to my friend. Actually, the reason I liked this activities because I was interested in mummies and all kinds of undead creatures and I would like to know more about it.

From this lesson I had learnt some general points of how the life in ancient Egypt was. Through the ‘Text Twist’ games I learnt to move fast and think quickly within a limited amount of time given. I also gained some useful information about life in ancient Egypt. If not because of this lesson being conducted, I might not know anything about Egypt in detail.

I feel that this lesson was fun but also gave me a knowledge about history of other countries. I really appreciated the teacher’s effort who had planned this activities for us.