You already perform every week: explaining a late bus to a teacher, calming a younger sibling, answering a question when the room goes quiet. Today you plan and deliver a brief performance of your own, thirty seconds to three minutes, for a real audience in this room or on a short recording.
By the end you will have one performance plan in your Communication Portfolio and proof that you delivered it: the studio transcript, or a partner's name and the date.
Before anyone speaks, you make three decisions. Form: what kind of piece it is, such as a monologue (one speaker, no replies), a role play, a radio play, a mime, a puppet show or a voiced animation. Audience: who is watching or listening. Stakes: what the speaker stands to lose or gain. Without stakes, it is only reading aloud.
Model monologue: The Last Bus (about 60 seconds, written for this lesson)
AOIFE (at a bus stop, bag at her feet): It's twenty past. The last bus is at half past. If I miss it, I'm walking six kilometres in the rain with a broken umbrella and a bag that smells of wet PE gear.
Mam said not to stay for the extra practice. I stayed. If I don't stay, I'm the one who quits, and I've already quit three things this year.
So here's the deal. I get on this bus. I go home. And tomorrow I tell Coach I'm staying for the full season. Not because I'm brilliant. Because I said I would.
(The bus appears. She lifts her bag.) That's it. That's the whole speech. Nobody else needed to hear it. But I did.
The clock is the bus. The first audience is Aoife herself. The real stakes are not missing the bus; they are not quitting again.
The activity below shows the model monologue written as an outline. Write yours in the same shape in the box under it: a header line with form, audience and stakes (not spoken), then the lines you will actually say, with a direction in brackets where a pause or the way you say it matters. Keep it to about 30 seconds to 3 minutes of speaking; most pieces land around a minute.
Need a spark? Pick a real moment where something was on the line, for example:
Own voice or character are both fine. A monologue suits the recording studio. Any other form, or any piece with more than one performer, is delivered live to a partner: put each speaker's name before their lines.
Your outline is kept in the box. After you deliver in the next step, you paste it into your one portfolio file.
This is the piece for your Communication Portfolio. Work in this order:
The studio does not keep the audio. If it shows a transcript, copy that into the box as your proof. For live delivery, add a line like Sign-off: Cara N., 12 March.
Pair up and review each other's delivery. Working alone? Review your own from memory and any transcript on screen.
Rate the piece on each of the four rows. Anything below the top level needs a specific comment. Finish by naming the one change you would make before performing it again, and copy that note under your plan (m4_l113_performance_plan_<your-initials>).
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