Hello new families! I hope you are all enjoying this fall weather in December! I promised you a blog post about what is a project talk and why you should have your child do one. So here it is.
A project talk is very simply a short talk about one of a youth’s 4-H projects. The talk should do 3 things:
Tell about their experience in the project
Give some specific information about the project
And it should promote the project so other youth want to do it too
For many of your club meetings 4-H’ers will give project talks during the program portion of the meeting. This is one of those valuable public speaking opportunities that 4-H provides. At Club Days when youth are in front of a judge the time of a project talk should not exceed 5 minutes. Younger members usually struggle to get to three minutes with older members having to really focus to not go over five minutes. Youth 7-13 can give project talks at club days. Senior 4-H members have to enter into the public speaking category.
A project talk should not show how to do something or tell how to do something. Those are demonstrations and illustrated talks. The Project talk is to tell about a project. Youth can make a visual aid that will sit on a easel while they are talking.
Youth should practice giving talks that have a beginning, middle and an end. If a 4-H’er is not sure how to make these parts of a speech a good rule of thumb is tell the audience what you are going to talk about, talk about it, then remind the audience what you talked about. That seems pretty simple for an adult but it a great starting point for a beginning public speaker.
Here are the rules for all of the club days events.
Here is a tip sheet on project talks with more helpful tips.
If your youth only does one thing at Club Days this year (Feb. 13th) I hope they give a project talk! If you have any questions please feel free to contact me at the Extension Office. 785-232-0062 ext. 120!
I hope to have another blog out this week about demonstrations and illustrated talks!
