How the StudentMotivation.org Project works

The StudentMotivation.org Project helps any school on Earth serving Pre-K through 12th grade students to begin significantly improving student achievement within just one year. (See “Reseach” tab in menu.)

The Project focuses students in every grade onto their own life goals and family roots. Students learn new stories from family history every year with what are called Thanksgiving Letters. They are letters from significant adults, including extended family in every student’s life, about goals for the student and family roots.

The 5 Project Handouts in the Handout Section of the  StudentMotivation.org website are available in both Spanish and English. Google Translate (translate.google.com) allows translations for free into over 100 languages available!

The StudentMotivation.org Project is free-to-use and volunteer-driven. Only family homework assignments, writing Thanksgiving Letters to their student each year, are needed from Pre-K through 2nd grade. From 3rd grade on the homework continues with only one full Language Arts Class a year required to achieve what will become the most valuable and productive writing assignment of your student’s academic life. Writing improves, but the homework including each parent, grandparent, and any close relative, is a critically supportive factor. 

In this one class, from 3rd through 12th grade, students bring to the class all the Thanksgiving Letters they have already read and discussed with each parent, grandparent, and other close relatives, from whom they received these priceless letters.

In this class they are given a #10, 9″ x 4″ envelope to self address with their full address, the date, their planned high school graduation year, their cell phone number & email address. All the letters go into this envelope.

In this class students also write a letter to themselves about the Thanksgiving Letters they received that year and about their own goals. This letter also goes into the envelope they prepared that year. It is then safely stored in the School Time Capsule Vault for 10 months. The letters are then returned by the Postmaster Volunteer to students and their families to be read again before the next year’s letter writing. (Only 12th grade letters stay in the vault 10-years.)

In the 12th grade students also add on their 10-year envelope a second address of a close relative who will probably not move in 10-years. Getting all 10-year old envelopes back to the original student is important!

The 5 handouts include:
1) a 1 page Project Description,
2) a 1 page Volunteer Recruitment page, and
3) a 1 page set of Letter Writing Directions for each parent, grandparent, and other close relatives writing the Thanksgiving Letter to their Pre-K through 2nd grade student.

These one page handouts are 2-sided with Spanish on one side, English on the other.

Only one volunteer StudentMotivation.org Project Postmaster, usually a parent, is needed for every 50 students in their child’s grade. Only 3 days volunteer work a year is needed, at the most, as they manage the storage for 10 months of the student envelopes. Then the envelopes are returned to students to remain in their homes. Each letter is again read to the student by the letter writer. Then new letters for that year are written. The annual cycle is repeated.

Imagine the impact of reading your letter to your 4 year old student the first time, and then every year thereafter! Your relationship will grow stronger, every grandparent’s dream!

The remaining four 2-page forms are 2 in Spanish and 2 in English. They are Letter Request Handouts for 3rd through 11th graders (the 4th handout), and a Letter Request Handout for 12th grade (the 5th and final handout.)

The 12th grade handout is modified to emphasize that all 12th grade letters are written about goals 10-years into the student’s future. In 2025 the 12th grade letters will focus on goals for 2035.

Start StudentMotivation.org Projects in the schools for your children and all the children in your extended family. The Project is free, with no registration required anywhere, unless the school wants to be advised of significant improvements. However, watching the dates on the handouts, and following changes as they happen, achieves the same goal. The “Overview” item on the StudentMotivation.org menu will also be changed when significant improvements happen. It will also help you keep up to date and should be checked as the Project is started each year.

Buying a vault to use as a Time Capsule for the envelopes is never required, but something most schools eventually purchase, often from Costco. It is an easy parent fund raiser after the first year of the Project once parents have experienced the value of life goals and family roots for their student.

A 500-pound or larger vault centrally located in the school lobby sends a message to students, and to all involved, about the value of the Thanksgiving Letters inside, and recording life goals and family history. 

Below is an older overview of “The StudentMotivation.org Project” when it was still called “The Family and School Time Capsule Project.” It is in 5 parts! IT REMAINS VERY TRUE! The name was changed in 2024 when it was realized only 10% of the letters written were for goals 10 years into the future. The first 11 years of the Project were dominated by 100% of ALL letters being focused on goals 10 years into the future. Only 8th graders and 12th graders were writing letters.

It took 10 years, 2005-2015, for the first Time Capsule Project middle school to improve to have the highest School Effectiveness Indices (SEI) of all 32 DISD middle schools! (See spreadsheet data in “Research.”) Now, with all grades involved in letter writing, and letters returned every 10 months from PreK4 through graduation, student achievement has accelerated 10-fold! See History linked from Homepage and “Research”.  The power of roots and goals is underestimated!