This term our Grade 9’s have been working through a unit about persuasive speeches. This unit is giving students the opportunity to explore a variety of passionate speeches presented by famous and influential people.

As part of this work, students engaged with
Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, exploring the context and analysing the rhetorical and oratorical devices used to make the speech so effective and memorable. Students communicated their new knowledge with their developing skills in structured paragraph writing as their first assessment.

They are currently working on creating and presenting their own speech about a chosen topic that they are passionate about. These topics range from introducing a four day school week, to social media's negative impact on adolescents. Students are required to thoroughly research their topic, write their speech incorporating rhetorical and oratorical devices and present their speech to their peers.