The art of persuasion.

In preparation for end of year Junior School exams (it is all going down week 3 of term 4), I have spoken to 9KRo about the importance of the written component for their English exam. The students will be revisiting a written or visual text that we have studied and will write an essay on an important character from the text. Before we get into the essay structure, character traits and evidence from the text - I figured that I need to get them back into writing. We are now into our second day of term 4, the students started off by doing creative writing on Monday. Today, the students have been given the task of writing a paragraph using persuasive writing techniques. I know that the one way to hook students into your program of learning, is by creating a space where they can voice their opinion (constructively of course!).

We spoke about what persuasive writing is. Not many clicked on to it straight away, so I spoke to them about church. Seeing as though many of the students attend church, I used the role of the minister and how they have been given the responsibility to encourage and persuade people through their sermons. From here the students shared that they think that 'persuasive writing is meant to convince people to believe what the writer believes'. I used the following persuasive statements/sentence starters and useful adjectives - as a prompt for the students to use for their writing exercise today.

The students were asked to write a statement - I was expecting one sentence - and this was the result...

Thaisoni- "I dont get why people just think its okay to judge certain people about how they act ,look ,and how they live. Just think how the people who are getting judge will feel. Just of if they judged them how would they feel. It's time for them to stand up and speak for themselves and to be assertive. I hate seeing people getting mocked and bullied it's so damn unbelievable seeing people constantly doing it. It's so extraordinary seeing bystanders just watching it happen."

Some took a creative approach ...
Tukaha - "It will be amazing if you’re able to communicate with this monster and make him fight with us against all the great nations.

“It would make things easier but it’ll take time, we need to negotiate with it and persuade it into helping us to win this war”

So what should we do to make it help us fight?

“We need to give it a name, calling it a monster will make it hate us if it understands us.”

So what should we call it sir?

“How about...Hakai”

What does Hakai mean anyway?

“It means Destruction and just by looking at it, it looks like it can do lots of destruction and bring pain upon everyone”

It was a fun exercise that was meant to take 15 minutes. The students were really engaged and decided to have fun with it, it took the whole period!