Freshman Leadership is a course offered to all freshmen for improving their leadership and organizational skills. The students learn the proper way to give speeches and conduct themselves in front of a class. Structured around regular checks of the students’ class materials, the class makes sure students are staying organized.

Specifically designed to teach students how to work as teams and present projects, they learn how to write speeches that are interesting and contain literary devices. Those include similes, metaphors and personification. Practicing the literary devices has helped students with English classes to make it easier to write and identify them in other writings.

“We annotated the Martin Luther King Jr. I Have a Dream speech, which helped us with literary terms,” freshman Elizabeth Eason said. “We will be doing that in English class, and that reviewed me before the literary devices unit. Our teacher, Ms. [Hannah] Ferrin, taught us how to write a good paper to present to the class.”

Communication is the most important topic of what the students learn. Communication is important because during a presentation, the group has to be able to give their idea to everyone and make them understand. Once given a project, the students divide up into groups and work together to accomplish it. One of the students’ projects was a world issue presentation, and they had to choose a topic from problems in the world and present it to the class. The students had to work together to finish the project and present it to the class.

Freshman Leadership is also a class that teaches the incoming freshmen organizational skills to keep them on top of all of their classes and work. They have regular binder checks each Friday in order to keep all classes organized, not just Freshman Leadership. This reminds the students to put their materials in the proper section of folders and binders.

“I wanted to be taught how to stay organized for high school,” freshman Tay Rafferty said. “So far, I have learned how to keep my agenda updated and color coded, along with keeping all binders organized. This has really helped stay on top of all of my work and school.”

But this is not all the students will learn this year. In the upcoming six weeks, the students will also learn the proper way to conduct an interview for jobs or college. They will learn the types of community service and how to become more involved in the community. Another skill the students will learn is the correct way to take notes for classes. This will help with studying for exams and being more prepared for class.

Freshman Leadership is the class that students take to learn skills in public speaking, organization and how to interview. All of this works with other classes. Communication is what will help the students to do this, and they are well on their way to accomplishing these tasks.