Speaking Up in Language Arts
Language Arts
When you think of Language Arts, you think of reading and writing. This year I did more than just that. I actually improved my public speaking this year in class. I completed a lot of mini projects in this class like literature circles and some class discussion. These really helped me in my ability to speak up in front of people because I did it so often. The whole class was encouraged to keep adding to the discussion. This felt really natural and okay, but little did I know that we were preparing for the Genius Hour Presentations. The Genius Hour Presentations are a project that we do at the end of the year while in the 8th grade. We are supposed to present something that interests us after doing research it. My growth in LA is that this year, I grew in public speaking.
A series of projects that we did in LA were the literature circles. Literature circles is an assignment in which we are given a book to read along with 3 other students, who share the same book. For example, our group got Swipe, a dystopian novel. Every group got a different book. We completed literature circles multiple times over the year, each time with different genres. Each week we assign ourselves how many pages we read till the next discussion. When we are reading, we have to analyze what we read; we have a set of tasks to do after and while you are reading the book. While you are reading the book, you are supposed to pick five sentences that really stood out to you, and explain why. These sentences could be picked to represent the Cognitive Reading Strategies such as making predictions, asking questions, and determining what’s important. This encouraged the fact that you were actually conscious while reading and questioning it. Also, you had to find three vocab words that you didn’t previously know, which helped in understanding the book a little better. After the reading, you had to ask some questions about the section that you just read. You could ask things like, “What did you think of__?,” or “Why do you think the author said__?” When all of this was done, we would bring it into class every Thursday to discuss with our group. Each member discussed and shared their vocab word, their sentences, and asked the questions that they wrote. Each week, someone ended up making a prediction. As you can see on one of my post-its from discussion#2, I made a prediction that one of the characters in my book had been given too much attention, and I concluded that she will show up at the end of the book as someone significant. Turns out that she was a spy that betrayed the main characters, so I was pretty happy about that. This relates to public speaking because we discussed during discussions. Even though it was in a small group, this project helped us build our confidence. The next step was to talk in front of the whole bunch of people.
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We did another project in LA called the Dr. Seuss Theme Project. This project was meant to teach us about theme and topic. A theme is something that you learned about life in the book. A topic is one word that describes what the story is about. We had to learn the difference between the two because they are sometimes confused. We first looked at Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham. The story described who one character tried to convince the other character to have green eggs and ham, but the second character refuses. When the second character does agree to eat them, he finds that he really like them and regrets that he didn’t eat earlier. We drew out a few themes about it, but the one that emerged as the most suitable was, “Trying new things can sometimes lead to your liking them.” A few topics that we came up with were “change” or “trying new things.” As you could see, the topic was less specific and related to the story. That was just the first part of the project. The second part was when we had to choose another Dr. Seuss book and do the same thing with it. My partner and I chose Oh the things you could think. This book was basically a book about how you could think of anything you want, but only if you tried. This projects was a little different from Green Eggs and Ham because, in this project, we had to find a current social issue that would match the theme and topic of the book. Since we had the topic of imagination, we chose North Korea. North Korea is an example of not having imagination. We researched articles about North Korea and found that people there were told to think a certain way, obeying the leader--who is evil. In the end, with all the information, we had to present this to the class. We made an outline of what we were going to say. An outline a way to organize and prioritize information in a standard form. There are many parts in the outline like the introduction, the main research, and the conclusion. You are able to use this during a presentation without looking like you are reading something off. When the day finally came, we presented our book to our peers. This is one of the things that helped me grow in my speaking skills. Actually presenting in front of people is another step closer to being able to present independently. Also, the outline also may be a strategy that I may use while presenting my Genius Hour Project.
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My speaking skills have gotten me a long way this year. I had to do an NJHS “speech” which I was really worried about, but it went smoothly thanks to all the practice we did about speaking up. I hope that this skill set will help me in the future, like presenting the portfolio for which I wrote this reflection. When I grow up, I will be required to present my work in which these skills are helpful. Over it will be natural for me. For now, I should just keep practicing. I think that the STEM school is a school that provides many opportunities to present your work, so I think that I will continue to improve this skill in the future.
