This mini-lesson (A spectrum of gifts) was taught as part of our persuasive letter project.
I invited children to consider things they would like to persuade someone to gift them (a thing, their time or an experience). Careful consideration was given to costs with our focus being on things that are ‘freebies’ as opposed to expensive unattainable items. The design of the lesson was interesting and emerged through a whole class discussion. Children had indicated that they favoured a mini-lesson in this area so we invented it together! I think it worked well, and really forced them to consider the nature of the potential requests they were making.
At the end of the session, I taught the children a technique for helping them to choose the one final idea they wished to take forward called, Let’s rank! We discussed the criteria we wanted to use to simply evaluate each idea and came up with desire (how much we really wanted the change, experience or gift we listed) and likelihood (how likely we were to have our request granted). Pupils collated their favourite ideas from across the two Generating Ideas mini-lessons (Make a change! and Spectrum of a gift) into ‘A top-five list‘. Having done that, we assigned a number of hearts for desire and a number of ticks for likelihood (a maximum of three for each) to help establish which idea should be taken forward.
We’ve given ourselves the weekend to mull over our shortlist and on Monday each of us will make our final choice and begin planning/drafting our letters.
By Tobias Hayden