The friendly letter is a ubiquitous elementary project, but without a meaningful context it often ends up as a rote exercise in following formatting rules. With the advent of digital tools and social media, the rules for formatting a friendly letter writing are also changing. While many bemoan this change, digital tools also made it easier to both edit writing, add visuals and voice, and share immediately with an audience beyond the classroom.

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Designed by teachers and educators at the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, the 6+1 Trait® Writing Model of Instruction & Assessment organizes writing skills into seven “traits” that provide a common language for writing instruction.

The traits are:

1. Ideas
2. Organization
3. Voice
4. Word Choice
5. Sentence Fluency
6. Conventions
7. Presentation

Using these traits can help students see techniques of great writing, as well as take action to build specific skills that improve their writing.

Here are ways you can use Wixie to help students practice and support skills building for each of the traits.

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The Wixie help includes tutorials designed to empower students (and teachers) to create to learn.

To access the Wixie tutorials, select the user profile icon in the blue bar and choose Help. At the Help window, select the Tutorials tab and choose a tutorial.

Don't worry if the content of the tutorial doesn't exactly match your curriculum. Use it to give students a quick set of basic skills so they can apply the same steps to build a similar project that meets your learning goals. Here are some ways you can use each tutorial.

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From templates you can print, to digital greetings with recorded messages, Wixie makes it easy to create Mother's Day and Father's Day messages parents love.

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Having students create and share greeting cards provides a fun opportunity to talk about the purpose of writing, to practice writing and speaking, and to connect the work students do in the classroom to the world beyond it. 

The authoring and sharing tools in Wixie make it easy to create and publish a range of greetings, from single pages of artwork you print to multi-page eCards with audio narration.

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