With the spreading of virus nCoV-2019 (Covid-19), schools are closed for weeks. My daughter teachers sent homework, recommendations to us so we can support kids during the slow time. Out of many subjects, there was an instruction to prepare for the school speaking contest. My daughter is grade 2, and this year topic is Go Green—Save the Planet.

Note: English is foreign language. We are Vietnamese.

My daughter delivered a speech to me. Wow, fantastic Lily! I really meant it—every single word. A few days later, the teacher gave her example speech in written form and a video. Oops! "it is not that simple", I uttered.

I knew there is a lot of work that my daughter and I have to go through. But, wait, I have not seen anything like this in my school years including the high school. Maybe there was, but not in my memory. I went through a quick reflection. That I had problems with explaining in writing. That a major of my colleagues had the same problem. We are developers, we write code. But we have problems with writing the design, explaining the root cause and solution in … writing. I wondered what if they were given this challenge. I did not bet on that.

For a speech, a thesis, there are usually 3 parts: Introduction, Main Ideas, and Conclusion. And that is the easiest part. My daughter knew that from Youtube. However, what includes in each part? Explaining that to a grade 2 kid is not easy.

Rewrite the whole speech

So the first thing I did was to convince my daughter to rewrite her teacher’s speech. She read the speech, watched the video. She understood and liked it. However, I was sure that she did not have a visualization of the scope—of how big the speech is, what are in the speech.

"Why do I have to write it?", she asked many times. Good question, kid! Why? Because "we are going to analyze the speech and that will help you do your own speech", I answered. She understood the reward. Let’s grasp a pencil and paper.

After 1 hour, with the motivation that we will play after completed the writing, she finished the task. WOW! "That’s a lot", she said.

I asked her to read it out loud. My mind was blown away with her result. I smiled with a happy thought that she is in a good school with great teachers.

Why do I ask her to write down?

1. Writing will help you remember longer, easy to visualize things, scope. With the developing of technologies, people can access information easily, and most of them stop at the reading stage—not a good habit IMO
2. Develop a habit of thinking on paper
3. Learn vocabularies

Analyze the structure

By analyzing her teacher’s speech structure, I had a better chance to convince her what are included in a speech. And the importance is that we have to do it together. Get her involved in the process.

The introduction paragraph is easy. She knows and does it well. The topic and introduction are general information.

They include

1. Theme (Go green, save planet): The importance of bees
2. Topic: Specific areas that bees contribute—food, plant

Lily chose Birds. So she had to do some research how the birds contribute to the environment. She did her first research with Google. People found what they looked for. So did she.

The main paragraphs is challenging. Here they are

1. 1 paragraph about role and contribution of the bees with numbers—facts, statistics
2. 1 paragraph about they are in danger and why with numbers—facts, statistics
3. 1 paragraph about calling for actions, what actions we should do

Of course, we do not focus too much on the scientific facts.

We went through each paragraph and read it out loud. We prepared another paper. I asked Lily what the paragraph was about. She explained and I helped her rephrasing them. After 1 hour or less, we had our second paper filled with the structure of her teacher’s speech.

We practiced saying the structure without looking at the paper, if could not remember, read them again. I wanted her to visualize the structure. So she will have a mental map of the speech.

So far so good! Lunch time.

Let’s write the speech

Nothing happens if we do not take action. Lily wrote her first draft of the speech base on the structure and facts we found on the internet–fact is crucial, not so detail, but they have to be there.

She could not make it in one go. But she did it beyond my expectation. I was impressed with how far she’s done. She completed the final paragraphs the next day.

It turned out this step was easier than I thought. She was comfortable with writing once she knew what to write.

Review and feedback

I asked her to write them again in a Word document (stored in OneDrive) so that I could send it to her English and Science teacher (thank you for your support); another good chance for her to remember the speech and ICT skill (computer skill in her academic program).

I didn’t do any correction. I sent whatever she wrote, original version. Her teacher was so nice that she gave a correction version with corrections highlighted. She did not change the content, she corrected the words, sentences, and asked questions for sentences that were not clear. I was so graceful to have my daughter in her class.

Lily and I went through the feedback.

"Are all the corrections correct?", I asked.
"Yes", confirmed after she compared changes with her version.

There was one sentence that was not clear in term of the intention.

"Should we remove it?", I asked.
"Yes. It is not important.", she replied.

Practice speaking and recording

After going through class lessons, we did not have much time to practice the speaking. We have practiced and recorded many times and finally submitted the recording.

Result

She got to the final ground in the campus. She was one of the 2 best, and her friend was chosen to compete in the school round. She was happy with the result. We made a promise to participant every year regardless of the result. The benefit that she have gained from the preparation is far more the prize.

Summary

I was amazing what a grade 2 kid can do. Many people think that it is too hard, too soon for them to work at that level. However, from that experience, I can say that it is not true. Everything is a matter of technique, preparation, a sense of humor. Learning, competition are fun if you prepare your kid mental in that direction.

Learn to encourage the kids, participate with them, support them but do not do it for them.

I wrote this post a diary without modifications to keep it honest and real. It was a journey and we handled the pandemic in the best way we could.

I am looking forwards to writing the same post next year.