House Presentation Guidelines

Each of the five houses will present on a topic.  The dates for these presentations are listed on your course calendar.  For your presentation, your group should prepare a 50-60 minute (or maybe a little longer) PowerPoint or Prezi presentation in which you:

• .Discuss your House's assigned theme as it weaves throughout the books: are there symbols present that point to a certain attitude toward your theme?  Give us book number and page numbers so we can see for ourselves.  Which parts of the novels (you can go all the way through 7 here) would you point to when thinking about the topic and how it plays out thematically?

• Incorporate the important terms we've used in class and that you've come across in your own experience that help to elucidate this theme in the novels.  Make sure your use of the terms shows that you understand them (and help us understand those you bring in from outside of class), but mainly make sure you use them to point back to the text of the novels themselves.

• Incorporate group participation from the rest of the class in some form of game.  There are so many fun ways to do this; I don't want to list any and thereby set a way for all of you to go about this, but ask me if you have an idea and want to know whether it'd be appropriate.  Think about involving your classmates in games in ways that highlight their knowledge on the subject in the books; get Houses competing.

• Use the movies: are there any spots where the movies treat the topic/theme differently than the books?  Or do they stay pretty close to the presentation of this topic in the novels?  Any ideas as to why they do/don't?

• In doing these things, seek to achieve some overarching purpose or answer some larger question at issue (Are the books sexist?  Why/how does studying gender in the books help us to understand them and/or Rowling's achievement better? etc.).

Each House member must have an equal speaking part in your presentation, and each should contribute something to the presentation.  Remember the rules of good PowerPoint: don't write paragraphs, just give us an outline of your presentation.  You may use movie clips and copy paragraphs from the novels if you need to.  Remember, less is usually more when it comes to special effects.  The House will receive one grade for this, but by the class period after your presentation, you are required to email me a memo with the tasks each person in your house said s/he'd complete and the tasks each person actually completed.  Anyone not contributing equally to the project will receive a grade lower than that of the House.

You may use what you learn from this presentation as a jumping off place for your research paper, due later in the semester.