Bluebird's Nest

The tween after delivering her speech on water bottles in Vancouver last year.

Last year around this time, my tweenager competed in the concours d’art oratoire. I wrote about this and about being proud of my little girl. She did her speech on water bottles and how terrible they are for the environment. Since then, I have been very aware about our consumption of plastic water bottles and always trying to use reusable ones. Thanks for opening my eyes up to this, JJ.

This year, she wrote her (almost 5 minute) speech on Switzerland: the mountains, the schooling, and the food. It was kind of a given that she would do this since she just experienced 5 months there first hand so what better thing to talk about. Her speech is wonderfully written and you can tell it come from the heart.

So this is how the concours works:

1. Write speech and practice speech until you know it without cards and can deliver it soley by memory.
2. Deliver speech to your classroom of students. Compete against those in your category (the concours is split into Francophone and French as a second language. The tweenager is Francophone since she has a native French speaker in the house and she speaks French in the family. Last year, she was the only one in her grade that was competing in the Francophone category. This year, there was one other in her class.)
3. Find out what you received as a mark. Based on this mark, it is determined whether you move onto the next round which is competing at the school level. (This year her and the other Francophone student both moved onto the school level and competed against each other again.)
4. Deliver speech to judges, parents, and students in all 3 grade levels at the school level.
5. Find out if you came in first. She did!! Congratulations!! Woot woot!! We just found this out yesterday so we’re really very excited.
6. Deliver speech to judges, parents and students in your grade level but from across the province in VANCOUVER at SFU in Surrey on May 5th.
7. Win.

But really you don’t need to win because you’ve already won in my heart honey. Just seeing you moving through each level, practicing, getting better and better, hearing you’re beautiful French, seeing your confidence, and going on this journey with you, is all I’ll ever need.

So so so proud of you hun. You’re amazing.