HICES Debating Competition 

Our debating year began, as usual, getting ready for the HICES Debating Competition! Our two teams; Emanuel White and Emanuel Maroon, dove straight into preparing for our first debate. 

The topic was “…that meditation and mindfulness classes should be taught to all Primary school students”. We came away with one win and one loss. We started preparing straight away for our next round. This topic was particularly interesting “…that therapy animals should be compulsory in all schools”. We all worked very hard and, using our experience from our first debate, updated our speech writing techniques. Again, we came back to school with one win and one loss.

At this stage, each team had experienced a win and a loss. We were midway through our preparation for the next debate when the global pandemic caused the competition to come to an abrupt end. We were very disappointed but never lost hope.

While we were home learning, we took a break to focus on our classwork. Once school returned to normal, we jumped into planning the Emanuel Cup. The Emanuel Cup will take place in Term 4. In this Cup, Year 5s will form groups and we will organise times when the matches happen.  

The Year 5 students who are interested in debating will get the chance to learn how a debate works. How will they learn? They will be watching us – the HICES competition teams! We will be debating against each other to model what good debating looks and sounds like! Once they get the picture, we will become their mentors as they compete in the Cup during lunchtimes in Term 4.

We look forward to fulfilling our roles as HICES debating leaders by showing the Year 5s how to complete a debate and by helping them with their own debating journey.

By Avalon Gold, Hannah Greengarten and David Li
The Year 6 Debating Leaders