Today was a formative speaking assessment day. Students had to compare themselves to the main character in our novel. First they had to answer 3 questions on paper: what keeps you from sleeping at night, how do you help your parents, and where do you go when you have a big secret to tell and you don’t want to be overheard?

After students had come up with good, detailed answers for each, I had them find a partner. I set a one minute timer and they had to use that one minute to compare how they answered the first question. They needed to fill the whole minute which required lots of follow up questions! After a minute they went to a new partner and repeated question 1. Another minute and another partner with the same question. We did the same three rounds with the other two questions. It was great seeing them talk to so many different classmates!!

They did a good job and it seemed like they thought of better detail each round!