Our home schooling philosophy is based on 24/7 learning, so it won’t surprise you to find that we use time in the car to learn! This weekend my family traveled to middle Tennessee for a family gathering in the Smokey Mountains. During the car trip down, David and I practiced impromptu speeches with a new technique called TRIAC that I learned last week from Andrew Pudewa. I’m used to preparing impromptu speeches from a 3 point mental outline (intro, 3 points, conclusion), but after a few rounds of impromptu with David (the kids declined our invitation to try it!), I’ve decided that I really like the TRIAC method better than the traditional method. Here’s what TRIAC stands for:

Topic

Restriction

Illustration

Analysis

Clincher

Ok, here’s how we “played” the impromptu game. I gave David a topic (birds), then he had 2 minutes to organize his thoughts using TRIAC. He thought my choice of topic was boring and wanted to talk about a more unconventional aspect of birds, so he restricted his topic to extinct birds. To illustrate, he chose 3 extinct birds (the carrier pigeon, the dodo, and the dinosaur); next he analyzed the reasons behind each bird’s extinction. Finally, he clinched the impromptu speech back to his “attention-getting” opening by rephrasing what he had said in the beginning.

As we played the game, we found that we that we gave a better impromptu speech if we started our organizing with the analysis step…we tried to decide on the meaning of our restricted topic first. This made the speech more purposeful. It was tough but a great exercise in organizing your thoughts without pen and paper. Later, I’m going to practice writing using TRIAC in my blog posts, and I’ll be assigning the kids a few essay prompts as part of their homeschooling…have you ever used this method? I’d love to hear your comments!

Tags: Andrew Pudewa, essay prompts, home schooling, homeschooling, impromptu speech, impromptu speeches, triac, Writing