“The King’s Speech” was a Youth Exchange Project, part of the programme Erasmus + , that was held from November  3rd to November 11th in Lithuania, in the Trakai Region.

The project focused on providing Young participants with the skills to present themselves through a good speech and also giving them the tolos to compose an oral presentation. Presentations and public speaking skills are very useful in many aspects of work and daily life. Effective presentations and public speaking skills are important in business, sales, training, teaching, lecturing, educating, and generally feeling comfortable speaking to a group of people.

Presentation skills and public speaking abilities are not limited to certain special people – anyone can improve it to a professional and impressive standard. But like most specialism, this requires preparation and practice.

Through a number of workshops, simulations and presentations about public speaking, visualizing, methods of information delivery, training methods, games and energizers, session dynamics, and many more things, participants  improve presentation and public speaking skills; they gained experience, knowledge and good practice of constructive analysis of their own and others’ presentations, basic rules of speech, visualizing and the use of informational communicational technologies (ICT) during presentation; and they were able to overcome fears of public speaking and presentations and feel confidence during presentation.

The participants of this project came from  Lithuania, Croatia, Russia, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Latvia and had some interest and needed to develop their public speaking and presentation skills. Also, the participants were either studying at college or have recently finished high school. Most of them were unemployed therefore. But, above all, the participants wished to contribute with their knowledge, experiences and good practices to local community.

Vilnius is really worth visiting and we strongly recommend you to plan a trip to the capital. It is full of history, amazing architectures, Art galleries, street musicians. Vilnius was in 2009 European capital of culture.

The participant stayed in in „La Villa Royale“. It is a villa house commonly used for weddings, team building activities and other big gatherings. The venue is situated 36 kilometers from Vilnius and 12 kilometers from Trakai.

After the project was finished, all participants received a Youthpass. Youthpass is a tool to document and recognise learning outcomes from youth work activities. It is available for projects funded by Erasmus+: Youth in Action (2014-2020) and Youth in Action (2007-2013) programmes. It is a part of the European Commission’s strategy to foster the recognition of non-formal learning, putting policy into practice and practice into policy.

While creating their Youthpass certificate together with a support person, project participants are given the possibility to describe what they have done in their project and which competences they have acquired. Thus, Youthpass supports the reflection upon the personal non-formal learning process and outcomes.

As a Europe-wide recognition instrument for non-formal learning in the youth field, Youthpass strengthens the social recognition of youth work.

Youthpass also aims at supporting the employability of young people and of youth workers by raising their awareness of and helping to describe their competences, and by documenting their acquisition of key competences on a certificate.

Above all, participants had  agreat time, they got to explore another city, meet new people, make friends and make a valuable lesson out of an European Project!