Your Home Town Presentations

Students,
After we finish our Pet Peeve presentations and the TV show assignment, we'll start on the "My Home Town" presentations. This will involve greater care in selection of material to talk about and to organize within a limited time (presentation) span.
    Unlike the Pet Peeve presentations, it will also involve focus. In other words, you make a main point about your home town and organize all your details around that main point.
    For example, you can focus on your home town as being exciting, beautiful, neighborly, festive, or cultural and organize your details around that main theme or focus. Of course your focus can be negative as well.
    In addition, you'll have to choose which home town to talk about, assuming you had several as a child. Mainly the presentation should be about your childhood home, not your present living arrangements! You might also wish to bring in a few photos to illustrate your points on our computer screen.
    The main goal is an effective presentation with focus, coherence, and fluency. We don't want students rambling on for minutes not knowing what their goal is in their presentation.
    Here's an example from a Simon and Garfunkel hit record (lyrics below), sung by Simon himself after the breakup of the duo. Of course you'll have to be more specific, but this is a good example in terms of focus:

In my little town
I grew up believing
God keeps his eye on us all
And he used to lean upon me
As I pledged allegiance to the wall
Lord I recall
My little town

Coming home after school
Flying my bike past the gates
Of the factories
My mom doing the laundry
Hanging our shirts
In the dirty breeze

And after it rains
Theres a rainbow
And all of the colors are black
Its not that the colors arent there
Its just imagination they lack
Everything's the same
Back in my little town
Nothing but the dead and dying
Back in my little town
Nothing but the dead and dying
Back in my little town

In my little town
I never meant nothin
I was just my fathers son
Saving my money
Dreaming of glory
Twitching like a finger
On the trigger of a gun
Leaving nothing but the dead and dying
Back in my little town
Repeat and fade:
Nothing but the dead and dying
Back in my little town

This is a video of S&G singing the song during a reunion concert in 2009:

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