School is a great environment for oral communication for children. It is where a lot of kids learn to talk. As time goes by, they naturally refine these skills. But the school plays the role of always pushing students forward, leading them to go beyond everyday oral communication forms, confronting known forms with other forms of speaking that happen in the world.

Therefore, in Year 5, when children are quite adept at using their oral and writing skills and abilities, we like to focus on developing their oral communication, with the goal of expanding the possibilities that they have to experience a moment of oral exposure. We invite them to reflect on the best way to speak in public, how to mediate between audiences of different ages, and how to use a microphone if necessary. “We are working with children to refine a set of skills, with a focus on speech clarity, fluency, audibility, lightness, what they sound like, whether or not they are being understood. We introduce them to the communicative adequacy models that are fundamental for someone who as an active member of society, so that they can become active children,” explained Gabriela Fernandes, Elementary Education Coordinator at be.Living.

The skills involve reading, writing, speaking, analyzing and reflecting on the language, mastering the use of some temporal markers, so that they are able to participate in oral discussion situations, analyze oral presentations of others for study purposes, and notice the distinctions between different lines.

All of this study, which has been carried out since the beginning of the second semester, is preparing the children for their major oral presentation of Year 5, which is the be.Living Arts and Sciences Exhibit (MAC). The Exhibit offers students an opportunity to individually present their research projects to the school community.

To help them prepare for the MAC, their educators create situations to train for this oral presentation that is given to other parents and children at the exhibit. One of the situations proposed was for the class to be responsible for helping to communicate to the school community the new health-related protocols that were created with the goal of rebuilding a school environment in which we could all be together and safe.

“Looking at everything that happened in the context of the pandemic, and considering that we wanted to get them back to something that, when we are not living through a pandemic, is very important for us here – which is organizing events like Festa Junina, or welcoming their younger schoolmates –, we came up with the idea of making them responsible for communicating and announcing to the community all of the safety procedures that we will have in place, including some that were already in place before and others that we will build together with them through active participation in assemblies on the subject. We asked them to tell the community everything they understood about the new procedures, and to do that by producing educational videos,” Gabriela said. By producing the videos, we were able to work with them on their oral communication – this time through a different type of media, preparing them for oral presentations – as well as self-esteem and confidence, emphasizing the rites of passage that mark Year 5 as a different and very special place within our school.

Watch videos produced by the Year 5 children here.

The content was produced in August 2021, so some protocols cited may no longer be in effect.

Complete autonomy was practiced in the script, proofreading, and editing.