Bethany the Toastmistress

It's amazing what they learn and do in Prep these days! (For those in other States - Prep is what we call the first year of school in Victoria).  In the last couple of months, Bethany has learned how to use WordArt in Microsoft Word (to do fancy & colourful fonts), do a presentation in PowerPoint (including animations where the words come onto the screen in different ways), and now a graph in Excel!  I told her she could already do way more than many of the people in our office!!

This week's amazing achievement has been to deliver a speech!  It's 2 pages long, which they had to write themselves by finishing sentence prompts given by the teacher (eg. "My favourite thing to do is...."), then they had to memorise it and give the speech in front of their class.  Bethany practiced lots at home and was even able to do her speech with lots of expression and without any prompts from the teacher.

The top 3 children from each year level will be giving their speeches at a special assembly - in front of the whole school and parents.  At Prep level, they have a choice whether they want to do this or not, given it could be quite daunting for them (and for many older children (or adults!)).  Amazingly enough, their teacher has managed to inspire them enough so that all of them want to do it at assembly, even the most introverted and normally shy children.

We are very proud to say that Bethany was one of those chosen to speak at assembly!  Yesterday she did her speech and did a fantastic job!  She was able to remember her speech and speak confidently.  She wasn't chosen to go to the next level of the competition, but we are very proud of her for getting this far, especially at only 6 years old!

I took a video of the speech but due to my little camera, the sound didn't come out too well, so I'll need to try putting subtitles on before I post it.  In the meantime, here's a photo!

Oh yes, and what made this an extra good day for Bethany was that she finally lost her first tooth!