Free.

Say it out loud. I like the sound of it (as all teachers do). When looking for Common Core Informational Text materials that word means even more. One of the standards that I am excited about is Informational Text standard 7. This asks students to look at text as inclusive of audio, video, images, and more! I found a great site that students can use to examine the written transcripts of famous speeches and listen to the audio. When my high school students used this site, their reactions to listening versus hearing a speech was pretty intense. Examination of intonation, word choice, and simple phrasing helps students begin a discussion of rhetoric and word play. Check it out for cool resources that you can use. The link is below along with a list of some of my favorite speeches:

American Rhetoric Paired Speeches

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/top100speechesall.html

The top 100 speeches of all time have been compiled based on a list created by Dr. Stephen Lucas and Dr. Martin Medhurst of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The majority of the speeches are available for students to listen to (audio) and the transcript (written text) to read as an Adobe PDF. This provides two different formats of the same text to analyze. Numerous choices are available. I suggest pulling the links and text yourself. Recently the site has started to feature advertisements that can be distracting to students. My favorite speeches for analysis include:

• Checkers, Richard M. Nixon
• Civil Rights Address, John F. Kennedy
• I Have a Dream, Martin Luther King, Jr.
• We Shall Overcome, Lyndon B. Johnson
• 1981 Presidential Inaugural Address, Ronald Reagan
• Resignation Address to the Nation, Richard Nixon