Unity in Diversity Day Workshop

Every year OSC has had a United Nations day to celebrate the school’s diversity but just this year they have renamed it to Unity in Diversity Day. The OSC community dresses in their national clothing as we celebrate the different  cultures we all come from (and eat really good food from around the world).  This year my grade was tasked with helping out with workshops throughout the different grades in our school. Each year the COMUN group chooses a Sustainable Development Goal from the United Nations to focus on. This year’s chosen goal was number 16: peace, justice and strong institutions.

 Anais and I were asked to help out with the 5th graders and lead a debate. We spent some time a few days prior discussing how we would run the debate and created a presentation to explain the UN, SDGs and the chosen goal for this year.  We decided on the topic of ‘should kids ages 10-11 have phones’. Though it’s not related to the goal, we wanted something that the kids would find interesting. On the actual day I was a little worried that the 5th graders wouldn’t find this topic interesting, but once we revealed the topic they all were very excited and eager to do the activity. We had two 45 minute blocks, the first half we gave our presentation and broke the grade into two groups to start their research. For the second we went straight into the debate. We made sure to have some requirements for this debate such as providing evidence, having three points with three speakers and a conclusion.  The 5th graders jumped straight into the task using resources to gather information and make points for each of their cases. My group and I were very impressed with their enthusiasm and research skills. When it came to the debate, the con side had an amazing start with good evidence but once we got to countering the pros had a much better argument. In the end we decided the winner based on their conclusion so the pros won since they had a much stronger and structured conclusion to wrap everything up. Overall this was a very positive experience and I was very happy to see how excited it got the kids to do research and practice public speaking.