Is there an overall theme that you’re being asked to do a PPT presentation on? If not, go pick up a copy of your local newspaper and scour it for news that impacts your local community or national news. I do know that the new Immigration Law in Arizona is hot-hot right now. You could present both sides of the argument and include some other aspects such as other states that want to boycott Arizona. The law was just revised this morning due to so much public outcry about ‘racial profiling’. You can find more information about it here http://www.vpr.net/npr/126408343/ or by running a search on Google on “Arizona Immigration Law.”

If your presentation has a time limit, you could point out just one aspect of the impact of the new law: boycotting, lawsuits against, if it is racial profiling or just giving police to add on the ability to arrest, if Mexican illegal immigration to Arizona and other states will slow down or stop, etc.

Remember that, in general, PowerPoint presentations are informative—not persuasive—so you’ll want to just lay out factual data.

Good luck!

I think your topics are fine but both can get pretty involved. What you’re going to have to do to keep them under 4 minutes is to stick to only facts: not your opinions.

For your informative speech, you don’t use opinions that could be argued at all, so that one is pretty simple. You are going to describe middle child syndrome with basic facts: What it is, how it’s detected, and how it’s treated.

Now, for your persuasive speech, you need to be sure to address the OPPOSITE viewpoints in your speech as well as your own. So, you’re going to state FACTS about why people shouldn’t watch Spongebob but also why people think watching that show is a good thing. You’re presenting both sides in a persuasive argument so you can show why your position is the right one. Since you like the show, you could write it in reverse (and it might be easier) along the lines of “Spongebob should be mandatory for kids to watch” or “Watching Spongebob should be homework” (you could add a bit of humor to the second one which always holds an audience’s attention).

Remember with both speeches you need to have a brief introduction, the facts, then summarize your speech in a conclusion (where you reference BACK to your introduction/summary to add strength to the information).

Good Luck!

First of all, this is a really good place to start for your statistics: http://greenliving.lovetoknow.com/United_States_Recycling_Statistics

Here is an outline template to go by: http://www.ismckenzie.com/outline-template-for-writing-a-speech/

For 5 minutes, you need to zero in on just ONE aspect of recycling and my husband and I just started one thing you’re free to write about. It started with my turtle who died in my outdoor pond (a rock came down on him during a bad windstorm). I wanted to bury him and told my husband to bury him in a grapefruit tree that was struggling. That tree is now going bonkers (due to the turtle’s protein and calcium shell, it fertilized the roots of the tree). My husband has really caught on and buries his banana peels in another tree: and it came back to life—big time. In other words, how to recycle fruit and vegetable peelings and create your own “compost” soil by burying them.

I have a perfect topic for you that I happened to just write about. You’re welcome to glean what you want and put it into your own words. Check it out at http://hubpages.com/hub/Cultivate-Healthy-Cooking-in-Your-Kids-WITHOUT-HEAT. Funny thing: right after I submitted it, there was a new show on TV featuring a chef going into an elementary school to help get them off of serving lunches with preprocessed food. Childhood obesity is on the increase, along with the diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and early deaths. The article should give you some ideas on that as well as children needing to appreciate good food in their diets…not fast food and soda. That would be a good one.

Oftentimes you can find great topics from the news in your neighborhood.