I am so excited! I just finished giving my presentation at the California State Fair. I'm a little sad too because it's probably the last time I will give it.
I hope my story inspires you to try the presentation skill opportunities in 4-H. You don't have to sign-up for a certain project. Anyone in 4-H can do it. All you need is a topic, some hard work to organize your content and the desire to get up and share what you've learned. That's it!
For the past several months, I have been working on preparing, practicing and giving my presentation at 4-H competitions. I started in January when I decided on my topic. Next, I started building parts of my presentation for my Public Speaking project where I needed to give a persuasive talk. I was trying to persuade my audience to try cheese making. I added humor to make the audience laugh. I tried to keep it short, memorable and fun.
The bits and pieces of that presentation slowly came together and at last I had a talk about cheese making, How to Stretcha the Mozzarella, to be exact. I wanted to demonstrate something so I focused on how to make my demonstration look believable without a real kitchen. I got creative and made a microwave out of a box and some screen material. It looked pretty believable. Finally, I worked on being able to talk to the audience and demonstrate the steps at the same time. I thought of the chefs I had seen on the Food Network channel and how they make it look so easy. Well, it's not so easy and it took plenty of practice, but boy it was sure fun.
My road to the California State Fair took a whole six months. It started with a practice presentation at my 4-H Community Meeting. Then I competed in the Placer County Presentation Day, the Sectional Presentation Day, and the 4-H State Field Day contest achieving gold medals at each level before the opportunity at the State Fair was put before me. I guess it's already time to start thinking of my presentation topic for this 4-H year and set some goals for myself. I can't wait to see you on the presentation trail too.