Recently a friend of mine called and asked if my oldest child Alejandro would be interested in participating in a Japanese/English speech contest. She and I both have children the same age and our children are best friends and they go to Yochien together. In this contest Japanese children would be speaking in English and American children would be speaking in Japanese. I left the decision up to Alejandro as to whether or not to participate in the contest. He told me he would participate in the competition. I made him promise he would work hard with practice and meeting with a speech coach. He said to me “OK mom. I want to participate. I promise I will persevere and not give up.” Our new adventure began.
My next step was to sit down with Alejandro and figure out how much Japanese he knew and what kind of speech he wanted to do. The only rules were that the speech had to be under 60 seconds. We could talk about family, dreams for the future, what we liked about Japan, pets. . . Alejadnro decided to talk about colors. We composed the first draft in English. I did not compose the speech for him I just helped. Then we got some help from an Alaskan friend of mine who speaks Japanese fluently to get it written in the Japanese alphabet. By the time we got to the first session with the speech coach we had a lot of our work done. She was impressed, I did give credit to my friend from Alaska. The coach looked over the speech and did a little revision and made it sound more smooth in the Japanese language. Then we proceeded to practice with the coach for several minutes. We headed to the speech coach everyday for about two and a half weeks. With the speech coach Alejandro would read his speech 5 times. Then she would read the speech and have him repeat after her, line by line. It was a lot of fun to see Alejandro get better and better with his Japanese. The speech coach was really great. She would often say how proud she was of Alejandro. Then three days before the competition the coach stressed that the day before the contest/competition I needed to have Alejandro practice but only give him “good job” as feed back. She said that this would boost his confidence and help his memory.
Alejandro’s speech is:
There are many colors in this wide world.
Red is like a delicious apple.
Yellow is like the hot sun.
White is like the cold snow.
Blue is like the spacious sky.
Green is like the forests with fresh air.
Black is like a fancy Mercedes Benz.
The beautiful rainbow that emerges after it rains has many warm colors.
I love them all.
kono hiroi chikyu ni takusan no
iro ga arimasu, aka wa oishii ringo no yo, kiiro wa astui taiyo no yo
shiro wa tsumetai yuki no yo
ao wa hiroi sora no yo
midori wa kuuki no oishi mori no yo
kuro wa kokyusha no bentsu no yo
ame agari no utstukushii niji wa
yasashi iro ga takusan
boku wa zenbu no iro ga
daisuki desu
iro wa honto ni subarashi
