How to prepare for your first speaking engagement?

In fifth grade he is now – the oldest-and may be his first talk give. Today. It’s not just a little story, no all the way with presentation, videos and questions afterwards. It is not about a grade yet, but an assessment is included.

For weeks he has been busy with it and for weeks you can tell he is very excited about it.

Presentation

During the how, what and why evening at school, we heard that a presentation would have to be given this year. Very good I think personally. Children then learn to present early and not like me who suddenly had to stand in front of a group and give my talk when I was older.

At the beginning of this year the speaking dates came in and topics had to be thought of.

Climb

Surprisingly, my son came up with the topic of climbing. Surprising because I had actually thought he wanted to do it about tigers or other wild animals, but of course liked this choice a lot. We and the boys are enthusiastic climbers, so super that he wants to talk about this.

Mail address

At school they all got a mail address. We pulled an old laptop out of the dust. Maybe not so fast anymore, but still worked fine. Through Google we started a presentation. He did this all by himself, looked up the text, found images and photos’and placed them in the presentation.

We helped him with two more beautiful exciting climb videos and discussed with him if he also wanted to mention the fatal accident recently of Ueli Steck in it. After all, climbing remains a sport with dangers and risks’s.

Today is the day

From the speaking engagements that have taken place, he has already learned that you should look into the classroom as much as possible and as little as possible on your notebook. He put his entire presentation on paper, printed it out and read and practiced it well over the past week and presented it to us with the presentation attached. The presentation should take about ten minutes. Today is the day.

He’s been working on it for weeks, finding it very exciting, scary, but also fun.

Good luck wishes

All I can do is wish him luck and I’ll think of him at home. I am so proud of him, that he does this. And how happy he will be when it’s over.