This week, a short and easy-to-run activity that creates lots of movement, lots of laughs, and is the perfect accompaniment to this time of year when things can get a bit tense with assessments looming.
It’s also a good one to keep in the back pocket for when you have any transition days, either with a new class or with children new to your school.
The Philosophers’ Cocktail Party
The set up is simple:
- Just download the file below and print out the questions, one per page. Best if they’re all A4 landscape and best if they’re colourful, but only do what your printing budget can stretch to.
- Once they’re all printed out, one question to a page, throw them up in the air into a space and get everyone to pick a question up and find a partner to ask it to.
- Then they swap questions and swap partners.
These questions are just a fraction of those in our whole-school Sticky Questions Oracy packs, which have questions like these on stickers. Every child goes home with one each week, year round, with a different set from reception to year six, plus separate year seven sets. 320 questions in all homes every single week. We wrote them all ourselves, before AI was even a thing, and we whittled them down from a long list of 2,800!
They’re designed to be easy to talk about with parents and then back in school. They don’t require any previous knowledge, and you can’t get them wrong. That’s not to say they don’t provoke hard thinking and plenty of delightfully puzzled expressions!
For this bulletin, we’ve taken a range of questions from across the primary curriculum pack, as well as a few thrown in from the year seven pack, and so being accessible for everyone from about year two upwards.
You can run a similar activity for younger children using a “Would you rather. . .” question with lots of options.
For example, “Which would you rather be and why?” with pictures of a variety of birds and animals, or occupations. The children have a picture each and pair up, decide on which they prefer and give their reasons for their choice, then swap pictures and partners.
You can find this resource, complete with a page of colourful pictures that you can print out for these young children, here.
If you do want this game to contribute to revision, just create questions that link to the exam topic, and you could even have answers written on the back.
What are we up to?
This week, Tom was in Liverpool at Archbishop Blanch School running an oracy workshop day for 25 students from years 7-12 who were soon to be grilling their local MP. He delivered a whole host of challenges, games and activities designed to help them look at issues from different angles, release their inhibitions, and cross-examine each other to push for deeper thinking.
If this sounds like something your school would be interested in, please do not hesitate to get in touch. To read more about what the days can involve, and what teachers say about them, follow this link.
Jason and Tom have also been running “Oracy For All” webinars this week as part of the Essex Year of Opportunity – just a few of many events funded by Essex County Council.
If you’re in Essex and you’re interested in what might be available, do take a look at our dedicated web page for it – including a funded CPD day plus live lesson at Abacus School in Wickford next Wednesday 29th April. Also bear in mind that there remain opportunities for bespoke oracy competitions and INSET to be delivered in your school, if you can, invite a few local schools along too. If this is something you would like to host, please do get in touch and we can see what’s possible.
Cluster CPD is always a good idea, no matter where you are, so even if you’re not in Essex, do get in touch if this sounds like something you’d like to host. It’s always far cheaper per school and leads to immeasurable benefits on teaching and learning for very modest outlay!