Speech Unit

Taking ideas from the 'Learning in the fast lane' I decided to do more in depth teaching and learning within our 'Speech Unit.'   Firstly by taking my small target writing/reading group, I knew it was important to expose them to our 'Class Topic Headings' and splash ideas with sticky notes of what were some good speech topics.  Eg: 'Community and Social Issues' we looked at certain things in our community of Waitara that pose as problems for us - straight away they were able to share lots of ideas such as 'Unemployment is it a problem?' 'Facebook, is it dangerous and what should we do to protect ourselves?' 'How can we look after our beach environment?'  

The next day I exposed the eight topic headings to the class.  I divided the class evenly int eight groups - 3/4  per group and they went around to share their ideas under each heading.  As I observed my group, it was great to see them all taking part and being more aware of each topic, also confident to share different ideas as these were written down by the group.

During the Speech Unit I always exposed to the group the learning the day before so they were more confident to share alongside their peers - the 'expanding ideas' graphic organiser was lots of fun as I decided to use the active board to engage more interest for these students.

Lots of topic ideas to help students choose one for their speech


Our expanding ideas graphic organiser to help us develop our speech ideas


This helped the students to become more confident to write a speech by knowing what were their technical words and use a dictionary to find the meanings, a variety of sentence starters and connector words to become more confident and able writers.


Our weekly speech WALT was always created by the students and they all tried hard to achieve these.  


We created our splash charts of each of our weekly WALTs for the speech unit.  Students wrote down how they tried hard to achieve it and showed evidence to their buddy.  The students also wrote their next learning step.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My name is 'INQUIRY' part 1

Reflection is such a vital part of being a teacher to know what went well in a lesson(s) and what could be improved for next time. Upon teaching my students the 'Inquiry Process' and building a learning wall to support their own inquiry learning, it came to my attention that students were still getting very confused about this whole thing about  INQUIRY.    Although the students helped create the learning wall based around an issue within our Manukorihi community, some students were still confused how to use the 'Inquiry Process' for their own inquiry investigations. According to J.Kellow 2012, the inquiry process and models are a guide however inquiry should never go through a step by step process.  I agree as the process we used was too controlled and rigid like J.Kellow 2012 suggested - where it lead the inquiry rather than the students themselves leading the inquiry.   From this, I decided to start again about INQUIRY .  I thought it was
Read more

Inquiry is not a process

Image
This is an inquiry model I used for our 'Successful Communities' inquiry.  My first thoughts?  Would students be able to understand this? And would this model support their inquiry learning? Once we did the learning wall under each 'process' for example 'Getting started' 'Planning info' 'Collecting info' as mentioned in my previous post - students showed understanding of each one, however the questions under each heading were confusing some students.  Their thoughts were - too wordy, it was hard to follow, do I answer all the questions under each heading before moving on? The 'process' had really informative headings which can steer a student's inquiry, however this inquiry 'process' needed to be changed in order for my students to be able to inquiry on their terms and have freedom to move around an 'action' without having a systematical process. This prompted me to think about including the students to cre
Read more

Acceleration in Mathematics

Image
According to Pepper Rollins (2014) Acceleration provides a fresh academic start for students every week and creates opportunities for struggling students to learn alongside their more successful peers.  I strongly agree as the maths activity I did with my stage 5 early additive group gave them more confidence to share their thinking and discuss their ideas with their peers when solving problems related to multiplication and division.       There was a need of my Stage 5 students to understand what the actual symbols of multiplication and division meant.  I decided to do an acceleration 'Sorting' activity exposing the students to maths language that also mean the same as the words 'multiplication and division.' This created a lot of engagement as not only was it a fun hands on activity, the students had lots of opportunity to discuss and share their thinking of where to place the 'words' given.  They also provided examples to support thei
Read more