Monday
3:45PM - 5:45PM
1st February - 29th March
5 Weeks
$495 $330
Presentation Skills Leopards is a hands-on and interactive beginner program that is ideal for students looking to build confidence in a supportive and welcoming environment.
Student to Teacher Ratio 8:1Provide students with a framework for creating basic persuasive speeches.
Help students leverage their own life experiences to inspire more engaging speeches.
Give students plenty of opportunities to practice and receive feedback in a supportive environment.
Monday
3:45PM - 5:45PM
1st February - 29th March
5 Weeks
$495 $330
Monday
3:15PM - 5:15PM
1st February - 29th March
5 Weeks
$495 $330
Wednesday
3:50PM - 5:50PM
3rd February - 31st March
5 Weeks
$495 $330
Thursday
4:30PM - 6:00PM
4th February - 1st April
6 Weeks
$315 $210
Saturday
10:00AM - 12:00PM
30th January - 28th March
5 Weeks
$495 $330
Bookings for Term #1 are now OPEN!
This course is perfect for students in Years 1 – 2 who are new to public speaking. Rather than teaching abstract theory (which becomes more crucial as students develop, but is difficult for students to engage with at this age), this program helps early-primary students come out of their shell and form positive speaking habits. Utilising activity-based, experiential learning, students will practice and develop fundamental skills, such as maintaining eye contact, projecting their voices, eliminating ‘um’s’ and other filler words, putting clear ideas together and thinking on their feet. These skills will stand them in good stead as progress in their school careers and life.
Every term, our Leopards program takes students through the fundamentals of public speaking – things like the importance of their audience, how to form exciting speech ideas and the best way to structure a speech.
However, whilst students will cover the essentials every term, the specific focus of the program alternates, with:
It’s recommended that students complete both programs to ensure they cover all their bases – however, there is no particular need to start with either stream, so students are welcome to begin any term of the year!
We place a strong emphasis on creating a supportive and nurturing learning environment, and strive to ensure each student’s introduction to presenting is a positive and enjoyable experience. We keep class sizes small so that we can provide each student with the maximum level of support and attention, including plenty of individualised feedback from our experienced coaches.
When audiences listen to a speech, most of their attention – around 93% – is directed not to the actual words, but rather to your physical and verbal manner. Given this, it is crucial to get this part of public speaking right to ensure that any audience is listening.
Utilising activity-based, experiential learning, students will spend most of their time in this program focusing on developing their own personal speaking manner, helping them engage with their audiences to a much greater degree (whilst also finding a moment here and there to cover the other essential elements of a speech like structure).
During the upcoming term, we will be offering our weekly programs both in-person and online.
For the most part, there is very little that separates our online and physical programs – both are interactive, cover the same theoretical concepts, and give students a range of opportunities to practice and develop their skills. Whilst some activities are different between the two, as some activities lend themselves better to physical or online classes, the actual learning outcomes remain the same for both classes.
Notably, the difference in price isn’t an indication of the quality of the program, or how much students will get out of the experience – both get the same amount of attention and care, and we’ve found some students develop better in an online environment. The deviation instead is simply a result of the higher costs (such as venue hire) associated with running classes in-person.
Should you want to learn more about our online offering, we’ve got a helpful video which goes through our Presentation Skills Leopards Online program below – stay tuned for one that explores our in-person program as well!
Whilst children appear to not be at particularly high risk from COVID-19, SSA places their safety (and the safety of our coaches) as our highest priority. This emphasis on safety is the first tier of our teaching policy.
We generally consider the risk of transmission at our programs to be very unlikely. This is for three reasons:
We have prepared our COVID-19 Action Plan, which outlines the three methods we are using to keep students safe.
Whilst you are very welcome to read the Action Plan in full, the three elements are:
Additionally, we will also be continuing to offer online programs for the foreseeable future. This will help ensure that parents and students who are uncomfortable with physical classes have an alternative that allows them to feel safe, whilst still receiving a quality education in public speaking and debating.
Please check out our COVID-19 Action Plan here, or get in touch if you have any questions!
Our Presentation Skills Leopards course is a beginner level program.
This course assumes no particular knowledge – students are more than welcome to join the program with little (or even no) public speaking experience. We all have to start somewhere – and this is the perfect place to do so.
That said, we usually recommend that students do two terms of our Presentation Skills Leopards program to ensure that they cover all the basics of public speaking:
Our Leopards program is also appropriate for students who have already completed our Presentation Skills Tabby Cats or Presentation Skills Tigers holiday programs (or alternatively our Tabby Cats Online or Tigers Online programs) – the Leopards course goes through a range of different skills, and uses various different activities, meaning that students are able (and encouraged) to do this program, even if they’ve already completed our holiday programs.
That said, if your child has already done multiple holiday programs with us – or has formal public speaking training from another source – they may get more out of our more advanced Presentation Skills Lions program.
Please get in touch if you’d like to discuss what’s best for your child!
After completing the Presentation Skills Leopards Manner program, students should:
Connecting with Audiences
The first few sessions are designed to help students get to know one another and feel comfortable in the classroom setting. Amongst various speaking activities, students will be exposed to the concept of an audience, and come to understand that speeches are about finding a connection between their personal interests and those watching their presentation.
Developing Speech Ideas
As students progress, they will spend a couple of sessions working on forming their own opinions and turning those opinions into speeches. They will have multiple opportunities to share and justify those opinions to their class – placing a particular focus on the manner they use to present those opinions.
Developing Speaking Manner
From the mid-point of the term, students will move away from the theory around public speaking, and start spending much more of their time focusing on developing their own personal speaking manner. Rather than concentrating on concepts, these sessions revolve around practise, feedback, reflection and implementation – the four critical steps to improving one’s performance.
Parent Presentations
The term ends with a parent presentation – an opportunity for students to present to an adult audience. Parent presentations are not only a great way to help students develop their confidence, but also represent an opportunity to showcase what they’ve learned. Students generally spend the last couple of sessions preparing and practising their speeches for the presentation.
For physical classes, we’ll make an assessment closer to the end of the term as to whether we can run presentations in person. If government restrictions still prevent parents from entering the classrooms, we’ll either film their presentations, or potentially live stream them for parents to watch from home!
Our classes vary in size every workshop depending on how many bookings we receive – however, the maximum size of our Presentation Skills Leopards class is around eight students with one coach.
If there aren’t any spots left, it’s usually because we’ve hit capacity – please get in touch with us and we’ll see what we can do about either opening an extra class, fitting your child into the existing class, or putting you on a waitlist in case any students pull out!
By the end of each program, students will have:
We strongly recommend waiting until Year 1 before enrolling in our Tabby Cats or Tigers holiday programs, or our Leopards and Lions term programs – all our Year 1 – 2 programs require students to be able to write at least simple sentences, as well as read their own handwriting and instructions on the board, which most Kindergarten students are unfortunately not able to do. This may well lead to those students feeling inferior to the rest of the class, creating new fears around public speaking – the exact opposite of what we hope to achieve.
If you think that your child has sufficient reading and writing skills, we would be more than happy to talk it through with you – alternatively, we would also be more than happy to add you to our email list (see below) so we can let you know when bookings open when your child is old enough to join!
My daughter is an introvert girl. Her voice was so tiny when she did speech in her daily school. But we were so surprised, on the last day's presentation, she improved her public speaking skill, especially she has confident to speak loud in front of audience.
Initially I had slightly reservations as it was going to be an online program given the ongoing pandemic with COVID-19. However, I am pleased to have made the decision.
The structure of the program, the attention to detail and support provided to my daughter has been invaluable. In particular, I understand the teacher after the first lesson talked to her managers and arranged to give my six-year-old extra attention where required after the lesson. As a parent, that extra support to accommodate the pace and different needs of children is what helps reassure us and sets businesses in this industry apart.
For the two times my daughter has participated in your programs, we have had very good experiences with Speaking Schools Australasia and I highly commend both the teachers!
Of the parents we've surveyed about our online programs...
Felt their child had fun
Believed their child's confidence improved
Thought their child's speech structure improved
Said their child's manner improved