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.