Speeches Final. Wow!

Over the last three weeks we have been writing and presenting our speeches. The process was:

1. Planning them in Mindnode (mindmapping application). See example (yet to be posted).
2. Teacher Conferences for feedback and feedforward.
3. Shared thinking looking at our burger speech writing poster and using Ultranet resources to help us understand the topic better. Thinking about TEE (Topic, Example, Explanation)
4. Deciding what the rubric would look like and at what level a pupil could earn the "Expert" badge.
5. Writing the draft in our "Brick" draft writing book.
6. Conferencing this 2-3 times with teacher and or peers.
7. Writing up the finalised draft in our online draft book.
8. Further conference and tweaking with teacher.
9. Copy and paste to Pages application on the computer to put into columns and sepearate into speech cue cards.
10. Print and mounting the speech cue cards.
11. Practising our speech to the mirror, cat, parents, peers, sunshine any other listening object.
12. Learning what it means to be a listening audience. Manners, respect and how to listen actively to give feedback.
13. Presenting it to the class where we had two peers assessing the speech against the rubric we had created and another as the timekeeper. We then got our instant feedback.
14. Final conference with Mr Grieve and the peer markers to plot ourselves on the online rubric that will end up in our forallrubrics journal.
15. Selection of final three to class semi-finals. Spencer Maynard, Jun-Wha Shin and Ben Shand were in this.
16. Semi final class speeches were held with class votes as to who would represent the class.
17. Middle school speech final where Spencer Maynard and Jun Wha Shin represented our class.

WOW! What a lot in the process of making speeches! I was extremely proud of each boy's ability to write a speech of close to three minutes and then stand up and speak clearly. Some got the next stage with actions and eye contact. We really enjoyed each speech and, although only two boys were our class representatives in the finals, I thought that each boy in the class stepped up to the mark.

We will be posting the speeches to our blogs shortly.

Mr Grieve

Famous N.Z. Writer visits Medbury

Brian Falkner came to our school and took workshops with different groups of boys. Sam from our class went. Sam reports that they looked at story structure. You should have a start, turning point 1 and 2, and climax at the end. The author then spoke to all of the middle and senior school about his life as an author. He talked about how "what if..." was a great way to make up a story. He told us about how he got published while standing in the JFK airport in America. That was his big break! We then had a tasting competition that comes from one of his books. Here is his website.

Written by Sam and Mr Grieve.