Eureka End of Term Activity - Speaking Competition
Eureka's Voluntary Community Service @ Maple Primary School
On 9th June 2010, Eureka voluntarily ran a successful speaking competition with coaching for Year 5 & 6 students @ Maple Primary School. Eureka coaches Patricia, Donna and Kathryn ran this Event.
The event started with interesting and engaging exercises in voice, breathing, body language and handling nerves, all of which are important for a speaker to make a good speech. Through these sessions, students not only had fun but also learned a lot of the important aspects enabling them to make an impressive speech.
After a break, each student made a ‘Just a Minute Practice’. First, each student was asked to come up with a topic, write it down and put it in a hat. Then, each of them had to randomly pick one topic and do a ‘one-minute’ speech in the front of the other teams. After each speech, Eureka coaches pointed out each speaker’s good practices and shared these with others; on the contrary, negative points were discouraged and made speakers and audience students aware. The speaker was given a chance to do a self-evaluation. Under Eureka coaches’ instruction, positive and negative points of each student’s presentation were collected from the audience. Feedback made students aware of their own strengths and weaknesses, and ideas of how to make a good speech.
Back from lunch break, the preliminary competition started amongst 14 groups. With the objective to enhance students’ presentation skills as well as team work, groups of 4 students were comprised of 2 from Year 5 and 2 from Year 6. Among the 4 group members, students had to nominate 1 as the Chair, 1 main speaker, 1 question handler, 1 closer with equal delegation tasks on one speech topic. Each group was given an equal amount of time for their presentation and rehearsal, while Eureka coaches went around to each team, observing and offering valuable comments and advice.
Under Eureka coaches’ training and nurturing, the preliminary presentation competition went impressively well. Presentation topics were timely, popular and interesting, from big topics like The Forthcoming World Cup, Global Warming and Music to daily discussions like schools uniforms, mobile phones and computer games. The way each student presented was extremely impressive: the fluency, confidence and team work; the correct use of voice, body language, demonstration and eye contact; the appropriate use of questions, and the professionalism, all of which made the Eureka coaches very proud.
At the end of the presentation, top performance teams went through to the final round of the competition were announced. Eureka is looking forward to coming back for the final competition - date to be confirmed.
Eureka believes that successful speakers can make great presenters and can be trained when they are young.
Posted by Donna Cranny - 14th June 2010.
No comments:
Post a Comment