Weekly Blog #33: 5/7-5/14

The past week of Independent Study and Mentorship has revolved around planning for Final Presentation Night. From May 7th to May 14th, some of my primary focuses have revolved around getting my programs printed for my room, constructed materials for my Brown Envelope Exit Ticket, and finalizing all of my materials for my Final Presentation Night Speech. I have completed my door sign and have put together a sign-in sheet. Also, I have picked up extra printer ink, and I will be printing a total of 40 programs over the course of the next week in order to manage my ink supply. Finally, I have finalized my speech. Over the first half of last week, I fully typed out my speech in paragraph format. However, after running through my speech multiple times, I found that the paragraph format did not work very efficiently, and I found myself stuttering and pausing, because I was unable to quote my speech word-for-word without reading directly off of the paper. In order to eliminate this problem, I reformatted my speech by bullet pointing the entire speech into an outline. This gave me more room for improvisation without feeling as if my entire speech was falling apart. This also keeps me from reading directly off the paper. Going into this next week, I intend to practice my speech every day at least once in order to hit the ground running on my Final Presentation Night.