Give a Few Words, Please

Just because your homeschooler doesn’t have a class to get up in front of, doesn’t mean you can skirt public speaking. Minus the captive classroom, you’ll need to think of ways to weave it in.

One of my high school friends had to take the required one-semester speech class four times. Yes, she failed three times, all because she couldn’t bring herself to talk in front of a group.

That’s a real-life example of those statistics we’ve all heard, about public speaking being the number one fear for many people.

Experience builds confidence. Students that have had varied experiences telling a group something - giving a speech, presentation, show-and-tell, whatever it’s called - won’t tremble in fear about it in high school or after. That friend and I went to the same grade school too and I only remember giving one speech. There must have been others, but not a lot.

When a group of us started an enrichment program with our homeschool group, we built in a sharing time. For the first month or two, there was one little girl who wouldn’t say a word and just hid behind her mom while Mom did the explanation of their projects. Then, she would answer leading questions (still from behind her mom), then she stood side by side, and by the end of the year, she was doing all the talking and Mom was smiling ear to ear.

When my youngest daughter was eight, I knew some teachers at a very small private school and asked if they’d like their students to see a presentation on vermiculture.  Scientific and icky – perfect, they said.

They scheduled an assembly, actually two, and there were about 25 kids in each. My daughter stood on a chair on one side of a table, with the bin in front of her, and explained how we made it and how the whole thing worked. She knew what she was talking about and I had presented the idea as sharing something cool with other kids so that’s the attitude she went in with.

Here’s one way to look at it. Think of the first part of the word “presentation” – we all like to give presents! When we do, we consider what the recipient would like, or something that they didn’t even know they would like. Kids can do that, in words, about their subject. Make it a gift. Learning about and getting to touch wiggly worms was an appropriate gift for that audience.

Instead of doing one semester or even a whole year on public speaking for my high schoolers, I built in a component of it each year, covering all the types – demonstration, persuasive, informative, extemporaneous, etc.

In a previous post, I wrote about the Early Childhood Education course that we did and how we wove a speech in. My daughter began by introducing herself and saying she wanted to tell them what babysitting had been like that year and that the kids had something to share too. That’s like the “from and to” card that goes with the gift.

Think of her summary of the year in babysitting as the pretty gift bag, tissue and ribbon. The present was the kids that were brought up -moms holding babies, toddlers fidgeting in that cute way they do. They did hand motions to a short Bible verse. Hey, that was a public presentation for them too!

It’s not hard to find materials that cover the how-to of public presentations. I say keep it simple. In fact, this is one time when choosing materials below your child’s grade level might be a good idea.

Why? Because the material is the same, but as the grades go up, the sophistication of the instruction can make a simple thing complicated and even intimidating. At least start that way, and then maybe go grade level for some nuances.

The most important thing is to focus on the how-to, not the fear factor.

As captain of her swim team, my daughter gave a short presentation speech at the year-end party thanking the coaches while giving them a gift from the team. A twist with this one was that she had to time appropriate pauses so that her co-captain could translate into Spanish for some in the audience.

And, she gave a year-in-review speech about our church's teen group activities to the congregation during the announcement time at a service.

These were real life occasions.

What can your students do? Think about who would want to know about something that your child knows about. Maybe a scouting club. Or, who should know what your child is interested in? Maybe a local politician.

Build speaking experiences in regularly, every year. When high school rolls around, your students will be good “present”ation givers and you’ll be better than Hallmark when it comes to finding occasions.