Five Minute Presentations

Every Thursday the kids in house give presentations. They make just five minutes of speech on one topic. It  doesn't take much time for a busy mom to educate her kids a little and it teaches them plenty of valuable life skills. The objectives of this endeavor is to have the kids learn writing and planning skills, the ability to present well, and how to handle healthy criticism.

We have some ground rules. Your prez has to be on something that you learned this previous week. It has to be no longer or shorter than five minutes. You also need to have something to read off. If I didn't make that rule the kids could improvise. They are amazing improvisers, but I want them to learn to write and plan.

At first it took them all week to tune up their presentations. Now it takes only an hour or a half or less. They scribble notes as they brainstorm, then formulate it into an outline they can follow when they present. They practice their speeches, to make sure they can introduce their topic, give a sufficient body, then wrap it up nicely in the right quota of time.

At first the kids were pretty bad at this, but now a year and a half later they are pros. They barely glance at their papers. They bring visual aids. They maintain eye contact throughout the speech. They know to keep it interesting for their assorted audience (the other kids who present later and me), or they'll lose our attention.

Afterwards, the kids get scored on a scale of one to five. Bonus points for the extra slides in their power-point, negative for stuttering. Here they learn to take healthy criticism and use it to improve. All in all, our little Thursday presentations are highly beneficial.

This is my second Instructable. how did I do?