Students speak volumes at Oratory Share-Out

CORNWALL — Armed with their notes, 14 students from the Lee H. Kellogg School in Falls Village joined students in grades five and six at Cornwall Consolidated School (CCS) to participate in a Cornwall Oratory Share-Out on Thursday, March 14.  

It had taken two months to prepare for the day.

Coordinating their studies via Skype with their counterparts at Kellogg, the project began with the study of great speeches, both for their content and their delivery. The students also became versed in the great speeches’ context and audience, how the speeches were crafted to achieve a purpose.

Then it was time to choose a topic of current interest and begin the research and the outline of their arguments, all the while working in shared study between the two schools.  

With as many as three drafts before the finished speech was ready, and lots of time practicing delivery, the final day arrived.  Students gathered in the CCS gymnasium for a pep talk and some warm-up exercises.

Demonstrating the rewards of diligent preparation, the students delivered speeches on wide-ranging topics, including climate change, gun control, endangered species, women’s rights, gender equality, civil rights, slavery, drugs, football helmet design, wildfires, carbon footprint and more. The speeches were delivered confidently and with polish and style, putting forth well-reasoned and researched fact-based positions, geared to a predetermined audience type.

Kellogg Principal Alexandra Juch said, “It’s such a great opportunity for the students to get public speaking experience and preparation. It gave them a chance to get up in front of an audience and to deliver a speech about something they believe in.”

“I was really pleased,” said CCS Principal Mike Croft about the event. “It was so clear that they had learned a lot about how to create and deliver a speech, from tools of persuasion to effective vocabulary use, from cadence to using gestures, and fluency.”