Email an Apartment Listing: Letter Writing and Life Skills

Email an Apartment Listing is a resource to help your students understand how to write a polite email to a potential landlord.

We spend so much time in the classroom teaching our students creative writing and essay writing, but when they have careers in the future, what kind of writing will occupy most of their day? Emails of course! In this assignment a specific kind of email that secondary school students may need to write is high-lighted and explicitly explained.

Year groups: This assignment could work well for students in Years 6–13.

How to use:

I would recommend downloading my Email: The Basics Handout and using it to teach your students the key vocabulary components of every email: to, carbon copy, blind carbon copy, subject, salutation, body, signature, attachments, compose, forward, reply, and reply all. Students need to know the function of each of these parts of the email (especially to avoid the dreaded "Reply All" mistake that we have all made once or twice).

Then, you can focus on this specific email example: emailing a potential landlord. Talk to your students about how you want to make a good first impression with this email by being conscientious and polite. Discuss how to choose an appropriate subject line and salutation with this in mind. You may want to write an entire sample email together as a class (perhaps typed on an interactive whiteboard). Finally, students are assigned a specific task to practise this type of email. They could write by hand on the provided sheet or type it up on their computer.

If you like this email assignment, check out my other ones:

Emailing a Job Application

Emailing a Post Secondary Institution

Emailing a Potential Reference