"Shirt Day" Project - Persuasive Skills Project

This year I have worn:
Red to raise awareness about heart disease in women. Pink to fight bullying. Jeans to support our troops
AND MORE

It got me thinking, with all these great days and colors, how could I make this into an activity my students would learn from and get them involved outside of my classroom!

And thus was born the "___________ Shirt Day" Project

I used this for my speech class since students were really struggling with audience. In this project they have to consider three different types of audience, which is perfect.

The Basics: 

• To introduce the project I find out what day is being celebrated that they may not know about. This sparks their interest and lets them see a model of me showing them how to persuade.
• Individually, students picked a "day" that they felt the school should honor. They give a speech presenting the day and persuading the class to vote for their day. 
• The class votes and the top two "days" are the winners.
• In small groups the students make persuasive video convincing the school administrators to let the school celebrate one of the two days we voted as leaders.
• Students vote on the best videos
• For the grand finale: The administrators watch the winning videos and select which days they want to support.

In More Details:
This was a really great project to have students practice different approaches and audience.

The speech they presented to class focused on different ideas than the video they make later to convince administrators to let them celebrate.

Motivation:
This was a great project because it was REAL. Students knew that their videos would really be watched and that everyone in the school would have the opportunity to "win" because of their convincing videos. Now, part of this motivation came because I work at a private school and my students normally wear uniforms. Nonetheless I think most students would find it awesome if the school did something because of a presentation that they made.

This year I whipped it up last minute, so the worksheets and directions aren't perfect. I'll replicate it next year and give you links of where to get copies.