Speech by Hewitt Homeschooling Resources Review

I really disliked my speech class during college. It was actually the only class I failed. I want my children to succeed where I failed. I was thrilled to use Speech by Hewitt Homeschooling Resources with my high school daughter.

For this review I received a physical copy of Speech:

Lightning Lit: Speech Teacher Guide
Lightning Lit: Speech Student Guide

You will also need- Lend Me Your Ears Great Speeches in History by William Safire. This is an essential part of the curriculum. When you click on the product link above you can purchase all three books in a set.

 
Speech is for grades 9^th through 12^th grade.

Lightning Lit: Speech Teacher Guide:

This comes as a three-hole loose leaf packet that is ready to put in a 3-ring binder.  The first few pages give you an overview of The Student Guide. 

 

Grading Tips for Fiction

They include amazing grading tips on several types of writing papers from Nonfiction, Fiction, and Poetry.   

Grading Tips Checklist

All of this information leads up to the Checklist. As you are grading your student’s paper it breaks it down for you to check off your student’s work.

One of the templates to record your student's grade

There are four templates to record your student’s grade. There is a complete sample page for you to look over also.

Yearly Schedule

The Teacher Guide also provides two schedules for a semester schedule which is laid out for 18 weeks.  A Full-Year Schedule is also provided with 36 weeks. The intent is three papers per unit. For either option, each unit has two lessons per unit. They also recommend that your student does one speech per quarter.

For each unit there are the answers to the comprehension questions.

Lightning Lit: Speech Student Guide

The Student Guide is a soft bound 145 page book. The book is intended for use with one student and is not reproducible.

Within this book there are four units and each unit consists of two lessons-which amount to a total of eight lessons. The lessons are self explanatory and should be easily used by most students independently or as a parent you can work through the lessons with them.

It is recommended that each student have a vocabulary notebook, reading journal, and access to listen to model speeches out loud. There are a few other suggestions that you can also do.

The lessons are all laid out in a similar format:

The Selections

The Selections- this is where you will be using your textbook, Lend Me Your Ears. The page is given for you to read. The book does not go in order so you can have a good mixture of different types of speeches from political, Patriotic, eulogies, arguments, sermons, and many other diverse speeches. 

While You Read

 While You Read- Information about what type of speech you are looking at. Some may talk about openings and another area will be focusing on the words used. It asks questions like how does it make you feel? What is the tone, does it grab your attention and so on.

A completed Comprehension worksheet of the multiple choices

Completed worksheet

Comprehension Questions- You will need a notebook or paper to organize your work here. You will have to write down your thoughts on the speech off the question. There are also some multiply choice questions too. Your comprehensive questions will tell you the page of the speaker too. This was very beneficial.

Literary Lesson page

Literary Lessons – Focuses on methods of speeches and I like to think of it has pointers to help you write a speech. For example: what do you include in a speech? From there it will focus on the content to you need. I personally enjoyed this area and could have used this when I took speech in college.

Writing Exercises-You have a few options to choose from for your writing assignment. Each paper is recommended to be one to two pages in length and have at least three to five paragraphs.

At the back of the book is a comprehensive Appendix.

Appendix A: breaks down the discussion questions by unit and lessons. This might be good for your student to look at after they write down their answers from the questions to get a feel of the objective of the speech.

Appendix B: Has suggestions of additional reading by unit. This is great if your student really liked a style of the speaker and wants to dig in deeper.

Lend Me Your Ears Great Speeches in History by William Safire

There are more than 200 speeches in 14 categories, ranging from Napoleon’s exhortation to his soldiers to Billy Graham’s Salvation calls. Preceding every speech, the author, William Safire, gives a brief background of the speech and the speaker. 

One of the speeches in the textbook

How did I use Speech in my homeschool?

I used this with my 16 year who is in 11^th grade. My daughter has some significant special needs so I adapted it to work with her learning style. She has learning disabilities, rheumatoid arthritis, and dysgraphia. I still felt I could adapt this for her.

Writing and reading are huge challenges for her and she is in lower elementary in these areas. However comprehension she is good in and especially if the topic catches her attention.

I spent a bit of time looking over the curriculum with my daughter’s situation in mind. There wasn’t much planning on my end with my daughter. I just had to come up with a mental plan that would work with her situation.

I read the speeches to her out loud. Sometimes she would ask if she could read some. I would help her read a few sentences. I would stop at each paragraph and make sure she understood what was being said. If she was unsure or didn’t answer correctly we would stop and talk about the paragraph again and read it again if necessary.

My daughter is listening to one of the speeches after we read it.

Some of the speakers I was able to look up online and see if they had any videos of their speech. My daughter does extremely well with retaining information within that format.

 

Working on the comprehensive questions

Afterwards we would open go over the Student Guide and talk about the comprehension questions. If I felt she understood the questions we would move on.

Bug working on her copywork

 

Being diligent about her work

Since my daughter struggles to write papers I had her type up parts of the speeches that she felt spoke to her. I used the speeches more as a copywork for her.

2 Completed papers she typed up

I had her type one full page. It would usually take her two to three days to complete that task. We had a few days that she wasn’t able to get her fingers functioning enough to type anything. To be able to make a dent in this for her we did four days a week and spent 30 to 60 minutes depending on what we did that day with typing taking the longest chunk of time.

 

Bug presenting her speech to her 4-H club. She spoke loudly and clearly

My daughter said, “This made me think about the speeches I have gave with 4-H and how important it is to gain our audiences attention.” “She went on to say, “Just recently I had my yearly presentation for my 4-H club. I’ve always talked about insects in some form every year. This year I decided to try something that doesn’t pertain to insects. I was surprised at how well my topic outside of insects was received. Several people had questions and they wanted to see the items I brought. My mom said that it was something that the group was more interested in.”

So very true as usually she just gets polite applause. I was glad her presentation was during this time frame. I liked that this made her think outside of her comfort zone and take a chance. She is college level when it comes to insects and very confident. I wanted to see her talk about other topics in the past but she just wouldn’t do it. I was happy that she took a chance.

We are going very s-l-o-w with this. This is really hard work for her but, so far she is hanging in there. I want to make sure she is getting the information and has the skills for public speaking. With 4-H and her business she has to speak to people. Her Autism makes it hard for her and I have seen huge steps throughout the years. Now I feel we can refine her skills and get her outside of her closed in box when it comes to speaking. I think she seen that she has to adapt to who is around her with even everyday speaking to others through the lessons we have done so far.

I really am impressed with the materials and the layout of Speech. It’s very straight forward and to the point. Even if you have a child who struggles with writing like mine it’ laid out in a manner to adapt it. However, I think using it the way it’s intended is the best option. I look forward to using this with my son in high school soon. I've been eyeing the Gr8 Lightning Lit Set for my son next year too.

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