This has been another superb term of Debating & Interview Clubs at WCCS now involving Tuesday, Thursday and Friday sessions.
We ended this term with a focus on Summary speaking and how to end an argument or pitch on a positive note, possibly involving a rhetorical question.
Our warm up questions have included:
(a) If you could make a movie for cinema, what would it be and why?; (b) 'What is your favourite holiday destination and why?' and (c) What was your favourite/proudest achievement from this term?
We have seen excellent responses throughout, with crucially long from justification - and often incorporating evidence or wider stories.
For our newsround across sessions we have covered the War in Ukraine, the conflict in Gaza, the Post Office Scandal, Putin's 5th term election, questions on Sustainability, the Budget in the UK and many other topics. As always we encourage our members to look at newsround, The Week Junior, First News and other news sources with their families throughout the term to keep up-to-speed with current affairs. As per last term, it is great when the pupils drive the debating topics from topics they have read about and it was superb to see many in our groups well aware of the crisis with global shipping and the Red Sea/Yemen. We have looked at 'unseen' example of shipping routes to widen the discussion.
In addition, to this current affairs unseen, we have also looked at paintings and philosophical questions, for example 'does health matter more than education?'
For our final unseen we turned to photos of Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr, Mother Teresa and Mikhail Gorbachev - and asked the students to identify them and then say what they all had in common - all noble peace prize winners.
Our debates have taken in motions including inter alia technology questions from e-books to robots replacing teachers, to climate change, and public spending on the armed forces.
Well done all! Looking forward to resuming post the Easter holidays.
Comments