Your anchor sentence
Read out the anchor sentence you wrote for homework. Your teacher closes their eyes and says where they are standing. If they get it wrong, rewrite it. If they get it right, you are ready.
Before you read your anchor sentence aloud, remember the test.
1. How do you know if your anchor sentence actually works?
What a portfolio piece has to do
Assessment criteria
| Criterion | What it means | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Coverage | Every significant existing feature is mentioned | 25% |
| Organisation | Grouped by location, with signposts between groups | 25% |
| Accuracy | there is/are, prepositions, compound stress | 25% |
| Usefulness | A listener could act on it — dimensions given, constraints flagged | 25% |
Note what is not on the list. No marks for perfect grammar throughout, none for a wide vocabulary, none for speaking without hesitation. This is a professional task assessed professionally: the question is whether the description does its job.
Match each criterion to what it actually means.
Fifteen minutes of planning, no script
Plan, do not write. A script read aloud fails the usefulness criterion — it sounds like a document, not a briefing. On one sheet of paper, note only:
- Your anchor sentence, written in full
- Three location groups, in the order you will take them
- Under each group: the objects, as single words
- Any dimension you want to get right
- The two constraints for your closing move
Put these five planning notes in the order you will write them on your sheet of paper.
Describe your own site
One check before you press record.
1. What comes right after your anchor sentence and three location groups?
Portfolio piece 1 of 10
Your own project, your own drawing, recorded
Deliver a two-minute existing-conditions description that a colleague could act on without seeing the sheet.
- Anchor. Three location groups. Signposts between them. Two-constraint close.
- Dimensions where they matter, approximated honestly where you are not sure.
- Record it. This goes in your portfolio and it is the benchmark for Unit 2.
Then write it up: 150 words, same content, written register. The pair — spoken and written — is the portfolio piece, not the recording alone.
Lesson 1, played back
The recording you made before any of this was taught.
Listen to your Lesson 1 baseline, then to what you have just recorded. Answer:
- What can you say now that you could not say then?
- Which error from Lesson 6 has actually gone, and which is still there?
- Is the second recording more useful to a listener — not just more correct?
Most learners are surprised here. Eight hours is not long, and the change is usually larger than it feels from the inside.
A last check on the unit. Each sentence has one error.
1. Have a trench drain across the head of the driveway.
2. There are gravel along the side path.
3. The client wants a wall of block on the rear boundary.
4. The panel is near of the gas meter.
5. There is four surface drains in the lower patio.
Unit 1 complete
You can now: describe existing site conditions in sequence, locate features relative to each other and to the property line, and walk a colleague through a plan they cannot see. That is the B1 can-do statement for this unit, and it is signed off.
Next unit: the drawing set itself — sheet indexes, scales, title blocks, and saying 3/32" = 1'-0" out loud without stopping to think.
Homework before Unit 2. Bring the sheet index from your most complicated set — the one with the most sheets. We will use it as the first text.
Last check of the unit.
1. What should you bring to Unit 2, Lesson 1?