Speech Contest

Last Saturday, I helped one of our leaders to judge a speech contest for a local English training school. The contestants? 26 students ranging from ages 5 to 12 performing short little declam pieces in English. There were 5 main pieces that I remember.
a. Mom buys us ice cream.
b. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
c. My name is "Ted" ???(Actually, I never could understand the main theme of this one so all the students that choose this piece got lower marks. )
d. Thirsty animals in the desert
e. Let's be friends.
The students really were brave to get on the platform and perform in English. Some of the contestants barely seemed old enough to speak Chinese, let alone English. There were 5 of us judges. We gave students marks on their pronunciation, expression, "correctness," and passion. After their speech, most of the students also gave a short additional performance of some talent that they had. One of the boys did some Latin dancing. One girl played a song on a recorder, a few others sang English songs or read an English poem.

There were also some bonus performance numbers like this one. These little girls did a choreographed dance that involved hopping and moving around in circles.