Year 8 Persuasive Poets

This week, our Year 8 boys have been writing World War One recruitment speeches and performing them to the rest of the class. Hamish summarised what they have been doing in English:

In today’s lesson, we all read out our recruitment speeches that we had done for prep last week. We were doing this whilst being filmed by a webcam on the front table and watched by everyone in the class. I thoroughly enjoyed reading out my speech and listening to other people read their speeches. I learnt a lot of new facts and statistics about World War One that I had not previously known and heard a tremendous range of vocabulary and persuasive devices that really brought the speeches to life!

A couple of lessons ago, we studied a very interesting and fantastic poem about World War 1 called ‘The Soldier’ by Rupert Brooke. We were given slips of paper with a line from the poem written at the bottom and we had to draw the first thing that came to our mind. Once we had finished our drawing, we stood up and arranged ourselves in a line, ordered by when our line occurred in the poem. For example, my line was first, so I was the first person to read my line aloud. Once we had completed this, we sat back down and learnt some facts about the poet, Rupert Brooke. We then carried out an annotation of the poem, which is a process of detailed labelling and highlighting all the literary devices and writing techniques used. Based on what we had learnt, we did a short seven question comprehension about ‘The Soldier’, which encouraged us to go into great detail about every microscopic line.

I came out of both lessons feeling tremendous! In just over an hour, I had learnt and discovered many things and facts that I hadn’t known before in a very creative and especially fun way.

Hamish T, Year 8

Click here to see one of the speeches live in action.