Excited For an Assignment

My students are excited. A little too excited, if you ask me, about their up-coming assignment. 

One issue I noticed with my children is that they have difficulty holding their own opinion. (WHAT! A tween without an opinion? Call the news station this is HUGE!)

All joking aside they really need help finding their voice. For so long these students have been taught that it's not okay to have an opinion in school. Just take what the teacher gives you and spew it back out on a test. With the new testing system in Ohio (PARCC) students will be expected to think and not just take a test that they have memorized the answers to. (Totally new concept, right?)

Either way their assignment starting today is to create an advertisement to persuade people toward their opinion. We're going to be talking about different persuasion techniques and connotation/denotation. 

I have picked a few decent sized issues for them to tell their opinion about:

1. Television is a bad influence.

2. School should be year-round.

3. Students should not take standardized tests.

All of these hit home with the majority of my students. Their topics are going to be chosen randomly by a great program called Super Teacher Tools: Instant Classroom. I like this site because it will create groups, seating charts, classroom arrangements, etc. Great resource.

Anyway, my students are looking forward to creating these advertisements because someone, for once, is not telling them to be quite and just say yes. Someone really wants to listen to them. I'm thrilled to see their excitement and to watch them work on these projects. I hope that they use this opportunity to their advantage.