Red Space Rocket

Hello Year 11s,

Some of you finished your Identity and Belonging assessment tasks today, and while other people are catching up you can make a start on your oral presentation, which is another assessment item and something you will need to complete quite soon.

The first thing that you need to do is settle on an issue and then a contention, since you talk will be persuasive.

Your issue should be something that has been covered in the Australian media in the last twelve month and, let me assure you, that gives you a massive range of subjects to choose from. To get you started, here are some news sites than you can read to see what kinds of issues are available to you.

• Google News
• The Age
• The Australian
• The Herald Sun
• News.com.au
• ABC News
• Geelong Advertiser

Once you’ve chosen a topic, you need to settle on your contention. Your contention is the point that you want your audience to believe. This talk is not about telling people both sides of an issue. It is about persuading them to share your view on your chosen issue. Lots of students struggle with this, but you can always ask me for feedback once you’ve written our your contention.

For example, a recent news item tells us that a music streaming called Spotify is not available in Australia. This is an issue, and a common fact, not a contention.

Spotify is bad for local music.

This is a contention, because it is a something that I can convince you to agree with. It’s not a fact. It’s an opinion or point of view.

Spotify is great for music customers. 

Again, this is a contention.

Once you’ve settled on your issue and written your contention, run it by me. I don’t tell you what you can argue for, but I go want to make sure that you are clear about what your contention is.

So, now you have your contention.

From there, collect the following information to help you build you argument and your presentation.

• Five statistics or figures that support your contention
• Two stories from real people that support your contention
• Three quotations from experts that support your contention

Once you have all of these, you are very nearly ready to start building you presentation.

If you have time, watch and listen to my presentation about creating effective presentations. It should be able to play just fine on the computers at school. But you don’t have to watch this, and we will be covering this same material in class.

Someone Belonging to Someone (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I know that a lot of you are away on the Outdoor Ed camp this week, but we have to press on.

Early in the week, we will be writing more body paragraphs that could go into our Identity and Belonging pieces. The ones that I read from 11B  are coming along really well, although most people need keep going and explain exactly how the examples that they provide demonstrate the point that they are making in their topic sentences.

Anyhow, we’ll work on this.

Then, in the middle of the week, most of you will complete the 100-minute assessment task on Identity and Belonging.

Then, we will start work on your oral presentations. You’ll be able to work on them as people who have been away finish their assessment tasks.

This week, we will devote most of our time to watching The Help again. This time, you will have two pieces of paper with you, one each for each of your creative writing tasks. Rather than just enjoy this film, we are watching it as research so that you can collect information to put into your pieces.

We will be sharing this viewing with Mrs Tyzack’s class, so things might be a little crowded.

You will be finishing off your creative tasks next week, and starting work on your oral presentations. If you have time, I’ll be discussing with you an approach to make an effective presentation.

Black and white warbler (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This week you’ll have time to finish off your two creative responses to The Help. Mrs Veal and I will both we around to help you as needed. Also, I suspect that some of you need to finish off your essays about An Arrangement in Black and White, but that is something that we’ll follow up with your individually.

We were talking today about how we can do research just by asking ourself questions about what you already know.

Here are the things that we already knew about the structure of a personal letter.

Written in paragraphs

Addressed to a person: dear X,

Contains personal details and feelings

Can use casual language

Is signed off at the end

Date

Address of the person it is to, and sometimes the person it is from.

Uses first-person words

Uses second-person words

Can contain questions

Once you establish what you already know, you can focus your research on finding out other things.

As you know, I am off on camping for the middle of this week. Happily, I have left plenty of activities for you to do to get ready for your Context response next week.

Please complete all these activities. There is a lot to do, but there is also plenty of opportunity to see what other people are doing and learn from that.

Activities

Some students said that they would like to see what a finished essay looks like, so I wrote a sample this afternoon. This took me a little over an hour and is probably a C+ or B essay. I have provided notes, so you can see what each part is doing.

Example Context Essay

Thursday (Photo credit: bob8son)

We have a fair bit on this week, Year 10s.

Firstly, on Monday. We’ll finished watching the film so that you can collect information for your creative responses.

On Thursday morning, I won’t be there because I will be on a camp, and Ms Veal will be away, also. However, you have plenty of work to do.

Here are the things you need to do on Thursday morning.

1. Edit your success criteria electronically for your first task.
2. Use the computers to create research questions for your creative pieces. Enter the questions and  answers into the Word document in that folder you just copied.
3. If you have time, complete the draft of your first creative response.

Ms Veal and I will be back on Friday, and we’ll be checking on this first drafts to make sure that you characters are making progress on this.

1839 essay by James Chalmers (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You will have one-hundred minutes on the computers today. You’ll need to work quickly, because we have a lot to get through.

1. Retrieve your essay from my resources folder on the W drive.
2. Read my feedback and complete your essay
3. Save your finished essay to your own directory
4. Copy your finished essay into my dropbox on the W drive.
5. Complete this form, so I have a record of what you are looking at.
6. Copy the folder called “Help Response” from W:\Resources\OMEAM\Year 10 English\The Help and into your own drive.
7. Edit your success criteria electronically for your first task.
8. Use the computers to find information for the research questions you wrote on Monday. Enter the answers into the Word document in that folder you just copied.
9. If you have time, start the draft of your first creative response.

"TUESDAY" production sign (Photo credit: Vaguely Artistic)

Since we have only limited access to the computers and internet, we will do some of our preparation for our assignments in the regular classroom today, before you hit the computers on Tuesday.

So, after our regular vocabulary builder and writing, you will get into groups to work out the success criteria and research questions for your creative responses to The Help. I’ll bring paper templates for you to use, and you can quickly type these up on Tuesday.

Photo of Gibson Reservoir, Montana, USA. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Now that we have finished the story, it is time to get some information out of it that you can use in your context responses. The main point of this essay is to show our understanding of the concepts identity and belonging, not to show off how well we know the novel Montana 1948.

11D have already done plenty of work on this, but I want you characters in 11B to add to this, too.

You might like to divide the book up into sections, like we did with Maestro earlier in the year. Or you might all just pick key parts of the book and add points from there. Either way, I would expect each of you to submit at least four forms of information in the single session on Friday.

If you run into real confusion, you can always leave a comment on this blog post and I’ll get back to you with a comment of my own within minutes. I am sick, but alive enough to help a little.

Put information in.

View the information that we have all put in.

Let’s do our vocabulary builder and 15-minute writing on the computers today.

I have prepared some document templates for you to use in for your responses to The Help.

You can find them on the W drive.
W:\Resources\OMEAM\Year 10 English\The Help

Copy the whole folder into your own school drive, and then change the file names so that it says your actual name, rather than “My name”.

The first thing we will do today is set up our success criteria and our research goals.

Collecting information