Speaking Team

The Speaking Team started this year with a new project. The first week the students were involved in reading the skeleton of a story, the second week they learned what it would look like to add in lots of details, and the third week (which is the week I witnessed) they worked on telling the story they had written, using lots of expression and motions! The looks on their faces seemed to say, “Now how do you suppose we’re going to do that?”

In preparation for the task at hand, the students played a game. Mr. Ty (Speaking Team Leader) asked one student at a time to come up in front of the class. He showed them a phrase or word and the student would have to try (without words) only using gestures and facial expressions, to get the others to guess what the word/phrase was. Each student took a turn and did very well.

When the game was finished Mr. Ty passed out each student’s story, and informed them they would need to break up into groups to practice telling their stories, while adding in what they had learned from each week.

I had the opportunity to partner up with Zach and was very pleased at the effort he was showing to add in facial expressions and gestures. Zach did a great job and seemed to be excited to be the first to get up in front of the students to tell his story. After each student presented their story the rest of the students had the opportunity to give positive and corrective feed back to each other. The students were very respectful and gave great feed back.

All in all, it was a great night to sit in on the Speaking Team. They have a great group of students who are learning so much. After the students had left I was talking to Mr. Ty and we were agreeing that the students had come a long way from just a few months ago, especially of the new students who just joined the team in August. We also talked about how important it is to learn to speak in front of people and most times it can be hardest to speak in front of peers. The students involved in the speaking team are learning a skill they will be able to take with them forever.