Persuasive writing is a great skill to have at your disposal, but for teachers, knowing where to start teaching this style of writing can be tricky. This article contains lesson ideas to help you get started with your class. I have focused on starter activities but I plan to develop further details, so do come back for more!
Starter Activities
Start your lessons in engaging ways by using some of these starter activity ideas and resources. The goal of these starter activities is to pique students’ interest, stimulate their critical thinking, and set the tone for the persuasive writing lesson ahead. They will help you to create a thinking environment which drives the lesson forward and helps students to develop their skills and ability to persuade.
If you are interested in delving deeper into thinking skills for your lessons, check this article: 8 Ways to Get Students to Think.
For more persuasive writing resources, check out these posts:
Starter Activities:
1. Would you rather ...
You might associate ‘Would you rather … ?’ with late night drinking games in university dorms, but ‘Would you rather … ?’ is a great lesson starter. It gets some strong opinions flowing in the classroom. If you have ever asked students would they rather have Diet Coke or Pepsi Max, then you’ll know all about strong opinions.
Try some of these out on your students and watch them argue! Of course, we want to use these strong opinions to lead into our more serious topics, but these are a great starting point.
Would you rather ...
- eat nothing but vegetables or never have a vegetable again?
- have hair for fingers or fingers for hair?
- be chased by 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck?
- eat your body weight in salt or live in an underground vault?
- have a time machine or a teleporter?
- stand up for a full day or hop for one hour?
- have the super power of incredible strength or be able to fly?
- have excessive hair all over your body or absolutely no hair at all?
- be shrunk, like in ‘Honey, I Shrunk the Kids’ or be stretched to giant size, like in ‘Honey, I Blew-Up the Kids’?
- always have your food raw or always have your food burnt?
2. Manipulate the stats
Give students a list of statistics and encourage them to manipulate them to support their point of view. For example, if 62% of people believe something, a student could rephrase this in the following ways:
- A staggering 62% of people believe …
- Despite the rumours, fewer than three quarters of people believe …
In the first, the statistic is used to support the thesis. In the second, the statistic is used to attempt to disprove the thesis. Playing around with phrasing can be a great tool to teach students who are learning persuasive writing.
Here is a printable worksheet that you can copy or display on your whiteboard as a starter activity:
3. Walking debate
In a walking debate, students express their views on a topic by walking to one side of the room or the other. You can choose the rules: either students must select one opinion or the other i.e. no in-betweenies. Or students can choose their location between the two opposites on a sliding scale. Once students have chosen their location, you can encourage a two-minute debate between opposing opinions.
This activity is great for kinesthetic learners who learn best by putting ideas into practice. It also makes for a memorable lesson and somehow, standing up to debate gives more confidence and tends to make students more lively. This is great for encouraging quieter students. Just make sure they don’t just follow their friends!
Ten topics for a walking debate:
- Should school uniforms be compulsory for all students?
- Is social media doing more harm than good to society?
- Should the voting age be lowered to 16?
- Is the use of animals in scientific research justified?
- Should the government continue to provide free healthcare for all?
- Is climate change primarily caused by human activities?
- Should the use of performance-enhancing drugs be allowed in professional sports?
- Is it ethical to use genetic engineering to create designer babies?
- Should the death penalty be abolished worldwide?
- Should schools be allowed to have rules regarding hair, makeup, piercings and jewelry?
4. Advertising techniques
Many of the biggest companies in the world use alliteration, triples, repetition and many other persuasive devices to create catchy and memorable slogans.
Use the slogans of famous household names to teach students about the language devices used to persuade. Click the button below for a printable starter activity to support this type of activity, or make your own similar one to best suit the ages/hobbies of the students in your class.
5. Create a sales pitch
Present your class with an everyday object from your classroom: a hole punch, your water bottle, your apple (every teacher has an apple, right?!). Ask students to sell it back to you. See what they can come up with. You can even use a timer like this one below.
You could get three students to volunteer, giving them 20 seconds each to persuade you to buy the item. The class could vote on the best sales pitch. Or you could get the class to peer assess by listening out for the devices used and choosing the best ones.
I hope some of these ideas are useful in your classroom to save you time or to spark your own creativity. Make sure you check out the other posts in this series to support your persuasive writing lessons: a persuasive writing example, a printable persuasive writing guide, and an FAQ guide.