Ideas for Slide Shows

• Ask community residents for any slides they may have of early years in your community. Or contact southerners who used to live in your community years ago. Some people have a slide collection that they are willing to share.
• Arrange to have the slides copied so that you can return the originals to their owners. This will cost money, so plan in advance. Where will you get your funding?
• Decide as a group what form your slide show will take:
  • Will you present your show to the whole community? Or to the families of the group members? Or to a school class? Or to an Elders’ group – in order to stimulate stories of the past?
  • When, where and how many times will you present the show?
  • Is the slide show your final goal? Or are you showing slides to encourage people to tell stories of the past? Will you record these stories? Will you write the stories in a book format that can accompany the slide show?
• Break into groups and give each group some slides to look at. The group writes down notes about each slide.
• Come back together as a group and look at the slides, sharing the notes the groups made about each slide. Do you need to do some research to find out more about the slide?
• Decide the format of the slide show and the order the slides will be shown.
• Write commentaries for each slide. This could be done in groups, so group members of different literacy skills can help each other.
• The facilitator teaches mini-lessons on the writing process, syllabic keyboarding, grammar and any other topics as they come up.
• Type the commentaries on the computer or write them by hand and mount them on index cards.
• Practice the slide show as a group, with group members taking turns reading the commentaries. Practice as often as you need to feel confident and ready for a public presentation.
• If the purpose of the slide show is to encourage people to tell stories, have a recorder and/or a video camera ready at the presentation.
• You could present your slide show to teachers and newcomers to the community so they understand the history of the community. Translate the commentaries into English and mount them on index cards. Practice the English version of the show before you present it.