Twenty-two children from Alpine, Lakeside and the surrounding back country areas took turns giving speeches, displaying their oral reading skills, giving instructional demonstrations and cultural arts performances or other types of presentations in front of volunteer judges when they participated in 4H Presentation Day this past Saturday.
Unlike a competition with contestants pitted against each other and a limited number of finalists, participants in this preliminary oral competition were trying for a high enough individual score to warrant advancement to the next tier of competition, held at the San Diego County level.
This initial round of presentations was coordinated by local leader Wendy Teasdale and included Japatul, Jamul-Chaparro and Manzanita 4H clubs.
“This is essentially an oratory competition held under the 4H umbrella. It is a precursor to county, which is much more competitive. The kids who have top scores at county go on to regionals, held at U.C. Davis, then state,” Teasdale said.
Toastmasters representative Sally Lutz and active duty Marine Corps service member Adnan Chowdhury judged the children across four divisions: 5- to 8-year- old youngsters in the primary division, 9 and 10-year-old intermediates, juniors aged 11 to 13 years old and seniors over the age of 14.
Chowdhury smiled and said in a softspoken voice that he was eager to see what the young people decided on for their presentations.
“I’m here to judge the presentations but I’m also curious to see all the topics they choose,” Chowdhury said.
The volunteer judges were asked to score participants using a rubric unique to each type of presentation, allowing room for children to play film scores on violin, demonstrate basic tap dance moves, explain the process of mining for tourmaline and other topics of their choice.
Each presentation was given a time limit and judged on such areas as content structure, volume of speech and audience eye contact, the number of visual aids employed, and whether they remembered to ask judges for additional questions.
The judges were asked to submit at least one question to each participant, but they often asked the children more than one question pertaining to their particular presentation, while looking amused at some of the topic choices.
For example, Chowdhury asked Julia Bellavance how many macarons she had prepared at home for her baking presentation which included a tray of about 10 samples that she offered to the judges.
Bellavance replied she had rejected 50 that were left sitting on the counter at her home with only the best brought in for the judges to view. The judge reassured her that even the rejects would have been consumed, causing laughter in the room.
