A Simple Cheat Sheet For Awesome Presentations With Your Student

Inside: Helpful tips to prepare a presentation with kids. Includes presentation benefits & resources for elementary, middle school and high school students as well as the multiple age homeschool classroom.

Breathing heavy with concentration, her chubby fingers drew out imaginative shapes then cut them out with crooked lines. 

Our living room was over-flowing with construction paper and the smell of crayons as she brought each character to life.

Recently her favorite story had become "The Little Red Hen" and our kindergarten daughter had decided to create a puppet play. After each character was taped on its tongue depressor, she performed for us behind a make-shift stage of chairs and a quilt. 

It was her first presentation. It won't be her last. 

The Importance of Informative Skills for Students

"Today, we can’t just prepare students for certain types of careers—we have to enable them to adapt to whatever new careers emerge." -Popular Science 

Recently, a Dell Technologies report estimated that 85% of the jobs that will exist in 2030 haven't even been invented yet. Which means career training and university could look very different for our kids than it did for us. How do you prepare kids for a world that doesn't even exist yet?

• A recent Dell Technologies report estimates that 85% of jobs that will exist in 2030 have not been invented yet. [tweet this]

With this ever-changing job field, we'll need to focus less on specific training and more on equipping our kids with tools to adapt. This includes the important skill of information sharing- so they can introduce themselves and what they've learned to an open job market. Presentations help build that skill set. 

There are many presentation benefits, even for younger students: 

1. Communication Skills: When kids grow up speaking in front of their peers, it makes public speaking easier for them when they're older. 
2. Improved Self-Image: Empowering kids to communicate, and respecting their opinions, helps them develop long-lasting confidence in their ideas. 
3. Planning Skills: While building a presentation, kids have the chance to sort through their ideas and arrange them in the best way possible.
4. Knowledge of Content: Teaching what they've learned to others deepens the student's understanding as well as the audience's. 

But what does prepping a presentation look like? 

How to Prepare a Presentation With Kids

(We received special access to mysimpleshow. All opinions are my own. full disclosure.)

• CHOOSE A TOPIC- Whether it's based on a book they've read, global warming, or the reasons that Superman could beat Batman in an ultimate show-down, it needs to be something they're passionate about sharing with others. They also need to choose it once and stick with it. 

• RESEARCH, A LOT- A professor once told me that you can't teach what you don't know. No matter their age, equipping students with information gives them confidence in their presentation. It helps them answer questions afterwards, too.

• ORGANIZE YOUR INFORMATION- For younger students, it helps to write down everything they want to share and pick out the most important information together. Or you can use a ready-made template from mysimpleshow to help them organize their material. Perfect for multiple age classrooms! 

Mysimpleshow's templates walk your student through the steps of organizing their presentation, step-by-step. Once students pick a template, they're given a overview of the different sections to include. 

Our oldest daughter wanted to create a presentation for her Girl Scout troop on kindness rocks (decorated rocks with nice messages that you leave for other people to find). Once she choose the "Vision & Strategy" template there were sections to fill out, including: Title, Introduction, Your Vision, Your Short-Term Goals, Call to Action- with included examples to inspire her. If she didn't want to include a section, she just left it blank. 

• ASSEMBLE VISUALS- This can be a stack of books, an artifact, a collection, or a graphic presentation. They should be helpful, without being distracting.

Once your template is complete, mysimpleshow picks out key words & chooses graphics to go with it. So easy! You can arrange the graphics on each slide, clicking on them to adjust size or choose a different image. You can also upload your own images. 

Then mysimpleshow finalizes your presentation by letting you add a voiceover (either a pre-programmed one or your student's voice) that reads the information on your template. In just a few minutes students can create a finished presentation, graphics and all.

You can download the videos or share them on YouTube, Vimeo or Facebook. A great way to share your student's presentation with the world! 

Isia' video on Kindness Rocks: http://videos.mysimpleshow.com/TBs76peuzD.html 

There are several mysimpleshow plans: Free, Fun, Business, and Pro. The Fun plan allows your student to use their own voice, include background music, and a few other gadgets. At only $4.99 a month, it's a very budget-friendly teaching tool. 

We'll still have puppets shows behind the quilt, but I look forward to adding more of these to our homeschool rotation. There can be book reports, history presentations, and year-end showings of the favorite things we've learned together. The possibilities are endless! 

Your turn! Did you love or dread class presentations as a kid?