Adventure Speeches

Fiona Skelly and Kalani Sims

This session, Adventure Studio worked on ten-minute “I Have a Dream” speeches. For the first week, we looked at excellent examples and brainstormed topics to choose for our speeches. We went on a field trip to the MLK memorial, where we shared posters that we made in small groups, each one describing a different quote. One of the quotes was: “We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience." This quote means that the end goal as a society is peace and morality. This message is still important because it shares how the world should have peace and prosperity.

We chose our topics by brainstorming things that we are passionate about, and we were also given a list of past speeches that we were able to choose from. After picking the topic, we began writing our introductions. Then we started to make our main points in our speech. The next week, we started to make drafts and got feedback. We listened to each other's speeches and watched how they were delivered, and whether the message was clear. After we received the feedback, we started to revise our speeches to make a second draft. 

Finally, after all of the drafts were complete, we could finally practice sharing our speeches. While sharing our speeches, we felt really good, but we were really scared at the start of them. When they were finished, it felt so good to be done with them. 

One learner shared, “I felt better about sharing my speech, and if I ended up not sharing it, I would not feel as good even though I was very nervous.” Another learner had to change his topic, and that was a hard shift, but he was still able to put in his best work and make his speech great. A third learner said it was hard, but she liked finding something that she was passionate about and was able to write a lot about.

We used to think that we were just writing and hearing about other people’s topics, but now we think it’s much more than that. A lot of people didn’t know about these topics before. Now, after researching and listening, we understand how many people are actually affected by these problems.