presentation slide with an illustration of a pirate, saying that his favorite letters are R and C

Slide Presentation Tips for Kids (and Everyone Else)

February 19, 2025

I recently had the pleasure of attending my younger son’s 4th grade class presentations about Urban Ministries of Wake County. Each trio of students used either a poster or Google Slides to share different aspects of the non-profit. (Then they went on a field trip to support Urban Ministries’ food pantry!)

Holy cow! I didn’t do my first PowerPoint presentation until I was a junior in college. I did my honors thesis defense with overhead transparencies. At the rate these kids are developing technology skills, I just hope I can hit retirement age before they take my job.

I sometimes do presentation workshops with college students and other adults. The 4th grade class presentations made me think…if I had to boil down my slide presentation guidance into a few simple, concrete tips for elementary school students, what would I say?

1. Slides and speaker notes should be two separate documents.

You don’t have to memorize what you’re going to say, but also don’t put it all on your slides and read them. Instead, use speaker aids like on-screen notes in presenter view or old-school index cards.

Following from this point…

2. Limit slide text to (depending on whose guidance you follow) 6 words, 2-3 seconds’ worth, or what would fit on a highway billboard.

Generally, people can read faster than they can speak. If you put lots of words on a slide, your audience is going to be reading them instead of listening to you. They’re also going to beat you to the end of your content. So, try to limit yourself to just a few keywords or a phrase. Using graphics can help!

So, instead of this:

A slide describing, in about 60 words, the history of talk like a pirate day

Try this:

presentation slide with an illustration of a young female pirate sitting at a laptop, accompanied by a brief timeline of talk like a pirate day

3. Resist the temptation to be “fancy.”

When I was new to group PowerPoint presentations, we got a kick out of picking loud templates and outrageous fonts. “Oh, no one in our class has used this flame template yet!!” Don’t do this. Your goal is to give information to your audience. Fancy fonts, busy templates, and zooming animations will usually distract them. Stick with fonts that are easy to read and templates that fade into the background. Stand out for the right reason: your message.

So, instead of this:

A complicated slide showing that a pirate's favorite letters are R and C. There's a vintage pirate map in the background, different colored shapes, and text in different fonts and colors.

Try this:

presentation slide with an illustration of a pirate, saying that his favorite letters are R and C

And guess what? These presentation tips aren’t just for kids. They would fix at least 80% of the issues I see in grown-ups’ presentations. 🙂 To that point, here are “professional” versions of the slides above:

A slide titled History of Talk Like a Pirate Day. There's a simple timeline showing that it was invented in 1995, publicized in 2002, and politically recognized in 2023.