About Quills and Quotes: Writing and Public Speaking Program

• Special needs: Not available
• LGBTQ+ friendly community

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User reviews of Quills and Quotes: Writing and Public Speaking Program  — Read all 7 reviews

Accommodations

Is Quills and Quotes: Writing and Public Speaking Program technology free? Students will use Google Classroom for assignment submission. Online classes will be through Google Meet or Zoom.

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In the News

July 1, 2020
Quills and Quotes will Continue Some Online Classes Past COVID-19
“For us, the change was not difficult, for we designed the curriculum to be technology compatible." ... Read More

June 30, 2020
After-school Mississauga Program Gets Kids Writing Essays
Parents in Mississauga and Oakville have found a solution to their children's struggles with essay writing. ... Read More

Stories

• Secrets to a Winning Speech: Tips from Quills and Quotes

  Every year, the same kid wins the school speech competition. During their speech, the audience is laughing, nodding and clapping wildly. You’ve decided this year is your year. This year, the audience will love you. This year you will win that coveted speech trophy. How? Quills and Quotes, a kid’s public speaking program, trains students in public speaking, and they have agreed to share 4 of their 19 sure-fire tips to winning a speech competition.

   

  1) Hook the Audience with a Prop

  Props are a powerful way of hooking the audience. Props engage the audience through visual appeal, plus they often add humour. Darren Tay, 2016 Toastmasters International Champion, incorporated a wonderfully creative demonstration of prop use during his speech on bullying. He began the speech with a dramatic pause and then put on a pair of white underwear over his suit. The audience was shocked, mesmerized, and HOOKED! The key to effective prop use is to hide the prop until it is needed in the speech; otherwise, it becomes a distraction. When Darren walked onto the stage, he concealed the underwear in his pocket; if he had walked on wearing the underwear, it would have had less impact.

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=v26CcifgEq4

   

  2) Use a Metaphor to Tell Your Story

  Metaphors help the audience relate to your message. When the audience relates, they care, and when they care, they remember. In this way, a metaphor makes your speech memorable. A fantastic example of metaphor use occurs in Ramona Smith’s speech, “Standing Still.” In this speech, Ramona compares life to a boxing match. The metaphor was so effective she won the 2018 World Toastmasters Championship. Watch the speech and notice how the metaphor creates a winning speech.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Tev43VNRIc

   

  3) Maintain Powerful Body Language

  People respond to body language. A speaker that “closes” their body or “shrinks” on the stage causes the audience to disengage. However, open, strong, emphatic body language connects an audience to the speaker. People interact with one another through body language, even when one is on stage, and the other is 20 metres away. So, be powerful on stage to captivate and hold your audience’s attention. Recall Ramona’s confident and energetic body expression; it mesmerized her audience and won her the speech competition.

   

  4) Close with a Call to Action

  When a speech calls on the audience to act, it changes the audience’s life, and that is a speech to remember. The action should be for positive change, and the final message should empower, inspire or motivate the audience to take that action. A particularly effective speech by a Quills and Quotes student on “Making Time,” challenged the audience to at that moment, choose a time every day for “me time,” to set a daily phone alarm, and to commit to keeping that alarm for 66 days. The speech created change and triggered action; that is a winning speech.

   

  We have 15 more secrets for winning speech competitions, so if you enjoyed these 4, enroll in a Quills and Quotes public speaking class today! Register on our website www.quillsandquotes.ca or contact us at 647-985-3711.

• Embracing Online Learning

  A Children’s Creative Writing Program Goes Online

  We will tell our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren about the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. We will tell them how it changed everything. Our views on travel, social encounters, technology, businesses and online classes changed. After-school programs did not miss a beat in the transition to online learning, allowing children to continue their extracurricular pursuits. Children everywhere took writing classes, public speaking, math, piano, martial arts, and even basketball online. Many of these programs are a stopgap until in-person classes can resume, but some have embraced the web world and plan to incorporate more online learning into their curriculum.

  One such program is Quills and Quotes, a creative writing program for elementary, middle and secondary students. They have found several advantages in conducting classes online, including:

  1) Achieving Efficiency: Driving back and forth to after-school activities often means rushing dinner, grabbing an unhealthy snack, hurrying to finish homework and tiresome hours in the car. With online classes, students can save hours of travel time and mindfully eat dinner. They show up for a course refreshed and ready to learn. Plus, instead of parents spending time driving and sitting through activities, they can complete other tasks; thereby, freeing up spare time to spend with their children.

  2) Eliminating Disruptions: Appeals for a washroom break or a drink of water may seem like a minor point, but these student requests are a significant disruption. The teacher must stop the instruction and address the waving hand, which interrupts the flow of learning. With online classes, teaching progresses smoothly from one point to the next and children in need of a break can do so unobtrusively.

  3) Improving Attendance: There are times when conflicts arise, and children cannot make it to their after-school activity, or they will be so late that it feels pointless to go. Often this is because a parent must work after-hours, or another sibling has an unexpected event. There are also health factors, sometimes children with broken bones or a nagging cough cannot attend classes, causing the student to miss out on crucial learning. Unfortunately, if a student falls behind, they often give up on the activity altogether. Since transitioning to online classes, Quills and Quotes has noticed a nearly perfect attendance and found that their students show up on time.

  Of course, whenever there is an upside, there is often a downside, and this includes security issues with Zoom (though recent updates have improved this issue), tech mishaps, less student engagement and lost social connection. So, while online learning has its perks, there are some aspects of classroom learning that many programs cannot wait to resume. However, faced with a pandemic’s social restrictions, it makes sense to appreciate small silver linings.

  For more information on enrolling your child in classes for creative writing, essay writing, literary analysis, public speaking or enriched English, go to www.quillsandquotes.ca or contact them at [email protected].

   

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