Express Session with Fortune Cookies!

Today’s session was an Express session which lasted for one hour.

Our Sergeant at Arms, Maria Luisa, invited our lovely President Jelena who opened the session by reminding us to find gratitude in life for our family, friends and things that matter to us. For those who are grateful are truly happy people. We then had our 3 new guests to the session introduced themselves.

Catalina our Toastmaster of the day began describing the agenda. She has chosen the theme of the session to be “Toastmaster Cookie Fortune” because fortune cookies have very interesting phrases that can be used as good practice for starting our speeches. Catalina then called on the 3 moderators to explain their roles for today. We have Felipe who is our Timekeeper, Merce our Grammarian, and Cristina our Ah-counter. The word of the day is “switch”.

The 1st and only speaker to come up to the stage was Gerard with his speech titled as “Jump and Speak Out!”. Gerard began his speech by showing a paper frog inside a bottle as he lights it on fire. He said whether the frog was real or not, they would have reacted the same: nothing, not moving or panicking while being roasted in the bottle. This was a great analogy of how we as human being are not reacting fast enough at global warming.  Gerard concluded that we needed to “make the switch” in order to deal 3 key factors (Reliability of Supply, Power Generation, and Land Consumption) or else our planet will get worse. 

As the evaluator for Gerard’s speech, Jelena provided great feedback with the “sandwhich” method. She applauded for his creativity, engaging with the audience with questions, and body gestures that vividly express his verbal communication. Jelena also gave suggestions to improve Gerard’s speech such as pausing more often in between his speech, making better use of the podium and having a stronger call to action to get the audience to act.

Then Mariyana went on stage to explain about today’s table topics. She brought a bag full of fortune cookies for our volunteers. The first person chosen to go was Paul who had to speak about his fortune cookie that says ´an alien of some sort will be visiting him shortly`.

The second person to go was one of the guests from Norway who got a fortune cookie saying ‘every exit is an entry to new experience’. The last person for table topics was Maciek, another guest from Poland, who got a fortune cookies saying it is ‘easier to resist at the beginning than at the end’. Very fun table topics indeed with lots of cheers and laughters as these brave volunteers went on to do an impromptu speech based on saying of their fortune cookies.

The general evaluator Laia then came up to the stage and asked the 3 moderators how the session went. Filipe our timekeeper said that our timing was good throughout the session. Cristina our Ah-counter said we didn’t have much words and sounds that were used as a “filler”. Lastly Merce our Grammarian said that 3 people used the word “switch” and they were Felipe, Gerard and Catalina. Finally, our president Jelena and Sergeant at arms closed the session with a big thanks to everyone for their dedication and great work.

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