Year 3 (Chestnut and Walnut Tree) - Debating afternoon!

Today, Chestnut and Walnut Tree classes teamed up to do some debating!

As we are writing a persuasive letter to Pandora (from Pandora's box) in our English learning, we thought it would be beneficial to get some practice in before our written work.

Firstly, we explored persuasive speech and how to use hyperbole to convince. To do this, we found a person with the same favourite colour/toy/subject as ourselves and persuaded them that we liked it more than they did. Miss Gillman's and Mrs Gordon's example was great to base ours upon!

After this, we chose a topic to form the basis of our formal debate. School uniforms are a controversial subject amongst us children so we chose that! We split ourselves up into groups and thought of points for and against school uniform. Some of our arguments (both for and against) took into account price, cleanliness, equality and practicality.

It was amazing to hear each other's points of view in a controlled, safe space. We used our school values of Respect, Tolerance, Fairness and Patience to make this a success and were really keen to listen to the oppositions argument! The key speakers were particularly effective in managing the debates.

After debating for a while, we reflected on our learning to see which children were more persuasive: was it the For Team or Against Team? We decided that in the midst of all the debating, it was too difficult to decide one team against the other as we all were effective in persuading each other.

We hope that we get the opportunity to do this again soon!

Chestnut and Walnut.