How a ‘Call to Action: USA’ Writing Project Made My Students Realize Their Words Matter
I taped the same note to three essays in a row: “What do you want your reader to do?” The answer, in every case, ended with “So we should do something about it.” That was it. No plan. No name. No first step.
It was the third week of our writing unit, and my sixth graders had picked problems they cared about. Litter in the park. Stray dogs in the neighborhood. The broken water fountain on the second floor that nobody had fixed since September. They had researched a little, written their arguments, and then stopped. It was like they didn’t actually believe their own words could make anything happen.
In writing workshops, we call that final push a call to action. It’s the sentence that moves a reader from nodding to doing. But for most kids, that move doesn’t come naturally. They’re used to adults telling them what to do, not the other way around. Asking them to tell someone else what to do feels strange, and sometimes a little rude. So they default to vague, safe sentences like “We need to make a change” or “Everyone should help.”
I wanted to give them a different way to think about it. So I called it “Call to Action: USA.” I wrote that on the whiteboard in blue marker. The idea was to make it feel like a real civic project, not just another essay assignment. The United States runs on people asking other people to take responsibility. That’s how a town gets a stop sign, how a school gets a new water fountain, how a neighborhood gets a crosswalk. Someone, somewhere, made a specific request.
I put two endings on the board. The first one said, “Please help stop pollution.” The second one said, “On the first Saturday of next month, bring a trash bag to the park and meet me at the pavilion at 9 a.m.” I asked them which one they would actually do. A few kids laughed. The first one, they said, sounded like a billboard. The second one sounded like a plan.
From there, we broke down what a call to action needed. It needed a specific person who could do something. It needed a verb. It needed a date or a location or a clear next step. It also needed to be small enough that the person reading it could imagine doing it. “Spread awareness” is not an action. “Make two phone calls” is.
That was the part that surprised them. They thought being persuasive meant using bigger words. They didn’t realize that being persuasive often means making it easier for someone to say yes. If you ask a principal to “consider installing a new drinking fountain,” they can consider it forever. But if you ask, “Can you look at the fountain outside Room 204 and give us a cost estimate by Friday?” that’s harder to ignore.
Marco, one of my quietest students, had written his essay about the broken sidewalk in front of the school. There was a crack that ran all the way from the gate to the corner, and every year at least one kid tripped on it during the fire drill. His first call to action was, “So please fix the sidewalk.” We talked about who actually had the power to do that. It wasn’t the principal. It wasn’t the teacher. It was the city public works department.
He looked at me like I had asked him to solve a math problem with no numbers. But then we opened the city website on the classroom computer, found the public works section, and clicked on “Report a Problem.” There was a form with spaces for your name, your address, a description, and a photo. That was it. No letter. No legal language. Just a form.
With his mom’s help that night, Marco typed up a short paragraph. He told me the next day that his hand shook a little when he hit submit. I told him that shaking meant he cared. We didn’t get an answer right away. But two weeks later, a city worker came out and put a small orange cone over the worst part of the crack. It wasn’t the whole sidewalk. But it was something. Marco showed me a picture he had taken on his phone, and I could see his face in the reflection, smiling.
That was one of those moments where the lesson turned into something more than a grade. We started reading real letters to elected officials and noticing which ones were boring. The boring ones listed problems. The interesting ones connected the problem to a person. One student found an email from a neighborhood group asking the mayor to fund a summer youth program. The line that stood out was simple: “We are not asking you to invent something new. We are asking you to fund what already works.”
We practiced writing calls to action for different situations. For a letter to a school board member, you might say, “Please add this item to the next meeting agenda.” For a text to a friend asking for help moving chairs, you might say, “Come to the cafeteria at 3:15.” The kids started to see that the same skill works everywhere. It’s just about being clear.
I also showed them what happens when you don’t include a call to action. I read a mock email that said, “I think the field behind the playground is not safe.” Then I read a version that said, “Can you meet me at the field on Monday after school so I can show you the hole near the third-base line?” The difference was obvious. The second one had a date, a place, and a question. The first one was just noise.
The most interesting part came when we talked about why so many adults avoid making direct requests. Kids are actually better at this than we are. They still have the instinct to just say what they want. But somewhere along the way, we teach them to be more vague. We tell them to “be respectful” and then let them guess what that means. Respectful doesn’t have to be unclear. Saying, “I would like to request a meeting with you next Tuesday” is perfectly respectful. It’s also clear.
I told them about a neighbor of mine who spent months complaining about a streetlight that was out. She told everyone in our building about it, but she never called the city. Finally, she emailed the Ward office and wrote one sentence: “The light at the corner of 5th and Adams has been out for three weeks, and I need it fixed before my daughter walks to school in the dark.” It was fixed in five days. It wasn’t because she was angry. It was because she made it easy for someone to understand the problem and, more importantly, what they should do about it.
When the writing unit ended, I expected them to forget about it. But a few weeks later, one of my students, Jyra, stayed after class. She had been working on a letter to the local library about expanding the children’s section. She showed me her final paragraph. It said: “Please send me the name of the person who decides which books the library buys. I would like to send them a list of titles and ask for a meeting.”
My first thought was that she had gotten it. My second thought was that this kind of confidence would carry her places. But I didn’t say that out loud. I just handed her a sticky note and said, “Write that person’s name here when you find it, and let me know what they say.”
Some classes finish a project like this and everything feels solved. Mine didn’t. The sidewalk still hasn’t been fully repaired. Marco checks the city portal every few weeks. I don’t know if the request is stuck in a queue or if they just sealed the crack and moved on. But I told him that getting the cone was real progress. It wasn’t the ending he wanted, but it was proof that his words had landed somewhere.
That seems like the honest lesson. A call to action doesn’t guarantee a result. It just turns a wish into a request. And for a sixth grader, knowing how to make a request—directly, specifically, without hiding behind slogans—is a skill that will outlast any essay.
I don’t know if Marco will ever become someone who writes official letters. But I know he can now. And when his hand shakes the next time he clicks submit, I hope he remembers that shaking means it matters.
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