Come to Team Practice: 

Speech:

 At every practice he needs to bring his Boards and "perform" 1-3 x's for various coaches and speech leadership for feedback on how to improve, he can also watch other speeches with a coach or member of speech leadership and provide feedback which helps him improve his own. Ideally, he will take the feedback from his last tournament and work with coaches and leadership to improve some or all the items mentioned that he feels need improving, with the goal of being a little better each time. Elias may receive feedback he doesn't agree with, in which case he should discuss it with our speech coach to determine if that feedback is right for him and his speech; as sometimes it may not fit what the student is trying to achieve. At the end of the day, I want him to be saying what he feels passionate about, and not just what a judge wants to hear. So if he is ever not comfortable making a change he does not have to, with the knowledge that not every judge may agree and it may affect his ranking, but he is confident in his advocacy

1. Office Hours: Speech leadership also hosts some office hours each week at Isabella Di Palma's home. This allows even more opportunities to improve a speech, as well as build more camaraderie with other speech members.

2. Record himself: when possible he can record himself giving his speech and see what he thinks needs improving. This is a great way to get a sense of how his body reacts when he speaks and will further help him refine his tone of voice and movement in the speech in a way that is true to who he is as a person, but also remove any unnecessary and distracting parts.

3. Compete: In order to letter they need to do at least 3 tournaments, but I recommend as many as possible. In addition to the two NM tournaments this month, I will be posting some 1-round online national tournaments that are sponsored by the NSDA called Springboards. With each of these tournaments, he will get feedback from judges who watch his speech, and, in most, he will get to watch other speeches in his event and see things he will want to adapt to for his speech. The Springboard tournaments are also a great way to get feedback from people outside of NM, which will also strengthen their speech.  One note with springboards, he will need to provide a judge to compete which also a great opportunity for you and your husband to get better at judging. Added bonus, it is only a one 1-hour round , and there are several of them where the speeches are pre-recorded and you have about a 2-hour window to watch about 5-7 10-min speeches and rank them.