Cross Curricular Oral Communication

For the first three years of my teaching experience, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to teach drama to a wide range of students and their learning levels. What I find funny is that it was not until I began my formal teacher’s education that I realized that what I thought was simply just sharing my passion for Drama with my students coincided with the requirements of the Oral communication strand.

https://youtechassociates.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/comm-1.jpg

It is a fact that we spend about seventy percent of our daily lives is communicating with others through various forms. Of this seventy percent, thirty percent of our communication comes from speaking. When this fact was brought to my attention it put into perspective just how important it is to teach our students how to communicate thoughtfully and effectively. I feel as though there is not enough stress placed on the importance of Oral communication, especially in the classroom, so I am going to make it my own mission to change this notion once I begin my practicum and into my future classroom. Once I decided to incorporate more Oral communication activities in my classroom I went looking for different activities online that I could practice in class and that is when I realized just how much Arts education coincides with the curriculum requirements for oral communication.

The Oral Communication connections in the Arts and Language Curriculum.

In a few excerpts from each curriculum doc, I realized both the arts curriculum and the Language curriculum had similar things to say about oral communication. For example, in the Language curriculum it states: “To develop their oral communication skills, students need numerous opportunities to listen and to talk about a range of subjects, including personal interests, school work, and current affairs” (Language curriculum doc pg 9) While the Arts curriculum doc has something similar to say about using oral communication in the arts. “Through purposeful talk, students not only learn to communicate information but also explore and come to understand ideas and concepts, identify and solve problems, organize their experience and knowledge, and express and clarify their thoughts, feelings, and opinions.” (Arts Curriculum doc pg 51) It is clear that through purposeful and effective instruction in the arts we are able to teach cross-curricular expectations, once I came to this realization I thought about one particular activity I did with my drama class that touched upon each of the important aspects of developing oral communication.

Orally Communicative, Cross-Curricular Activities in Practice. 

http://bit.ly/2idc5VT

I once ran an activity where the students were given the opportunity to research an important current event and it was their job to present this topic to the class in the form of a news report. I really liked being able to do this activity with my drama class, I was teaching it at the time only focusing on the dramatic elements of it, however, an activity such as this could easily span across the requirements for both the arts and the language curriculum. What is a simple activity to run is one that gets students to focus on what is happening in the world around them, it gives them the opportunity to form their own opinions and most importantly it gives them the chance to speak to their classmates through presentations and focused talk. It is a wonderful cross-curricular activity that I will try to use with my classes each year, it promotes important conversations and teaches students how to communicate thoughtfully and purposefully in both a linguistic and artistic way.

Inspiring our Students to Write

In many classrooms, students tend to have a negative outlook towards writing. There are many factors that can go into this fixed mindset one of which includes a lack of inspiration and ideas when trying to write creative stories and journal entries. 

What many students do not realize is that writing is an important component in 

• communication 
• socializing 
• and it is influential to how others perceive you 

In a Pinterest board, I found a great resource that helps to inspire students to write. I think that using this kind of resource will help students in a significant way, especially at the junior level to write journal entries. I would love to incorporate a writing jar into my classroom to help motivate students to write short stories and journal entries.  

In such a simple and open-ended activity, the use of a writing jar in the classroom touches most on the first expectation of the Ontario Language Curriculum expectations in writing(pg 12). This is a simple idea that could allow students to practice generating, gathering, and organizing ideas and info to write for an intended purpose and audience. The idea of the writing jar is that students are given the chance to draw an open-ended question out of a jar to which they answer in a journal. The jar can contain a countless number of topics and ideas that can help inspire students to write either a creative paragraph or write about their daily lives. Using this resource in the classroom gives students more opportunity to motivate themselves to write more. In giving students these broad questions it forces them to gather their thoughts, organize their ideas and write them out on the page. 

  It is important to give class time to students to practice their writing skills. I think that the use of a journal is great way to help students to understand how important writing is in communicating ourselves to the world.  While incorporating writing is a great way to get students to be working quietly and practicing their writing, when I see journal writing in practice I find myself during this time helping students to simply decide on a topic instead of seeing students spending the bulk of the period with writing in their journal. I think that using the writing jar strategy in class would help to minimize the time used in deciding on a topic in general. I like the idea that using the writing jar gives students a wide variety of questions to choose to inspire students and excite them to write creatively. I think that giving students that choice also makes them more motivated to write about something they have chosen.

 I think that implementing these types of activities will be a good starting point to get students more interested in writing. Using different activities like:

•          The Writing Jar
•          Or Chapter Summary tweets
•          Or Facebook profile character sketches.

The activites listed above are a few of the many ways in which we can foster a positive attitude towards writing. These kinds of activities reach out to students in an engaging way, that helps them to understand how writing applies to our communication skills. These activities are ones that I would like to try in the future and I think that they could make a positive impact on the attitude towards writing in the Classroom. As educators, we must help students get inspired to write and show them that writing is more than just creating "good" short stories, essays or Journal entries. It is an important form of expression and communication. Students must be able to understand the impact writing has on our daily lives, and how others perceive us.