Friday, June 22

I had to judge an English speech contest at my school today. The students all turned in scripts and I was able to read them over yesterday. This was my favorite speech. I thought it was clever and cute.

There were a lot of really impressive scripts, but it turns out that a lot of them didn’t live up to the writing. It was probably a mixture of nerves and the fact that the speeches were either written by or heavily revised by someone with a much higher English level.

I was really impressed by one 4th grader in particular. Yesterday when I read the scripts, I didn’t think much of hers. It was really simple. She wrote about I can/can’t.

She nailed it! She exuded confidence and memorized her speech perfectly. The great thing about it was that she probably wrote the entire thing herself. It was simple, but it was on her level and she did a fantastic job.

She won… the 3rd/4th grade competition. And both of the other top 3 had lived in the States for 6 months.