If thoughts of speaking to a classroom full of kids makes your eyes bulge with horror, get over it. Teacher Says: You don’t have to speechify like Abe Lincoln to share your experiences and talents in school. All it takes is passion and a feathered dance stick.

“What makes a great school speaker is someone who has the passion to convey their expertise in a way that inspires a child to say, ‘I can do that,’ ” said Gail Woolf, Connection Resource Bank coordinator for Montgomery County, Md., public schools, which provides volunteer speakers, tutors, mentors, judges and consultants for MCPS teachers.

Even speaking for 20 minutes could change a kid’s life for the better. “Though a meeting might be momentary, you could become a support person for a child,” said veteran school speaker Mitzi Young, a litigation attorney for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The following suggestions target audiences from kindergarten to grade 12:

• Do your classwork. “Talk to the teacher ahead of time. Find out what they are doing in the classroom,” said veteran classroom speaker Sallie Lowenstein, a young adult author and illustrator from Rockville, Md.
• Know your audience. How long will you have to speak? What kinds of activities does this class enjoy? Are there any trigger words to avoid or games they dislike? Ask the teacher about ages, boy/girl distribution, group size and special-needs students. Get a feel for ability, vocabulary and attention levels. “Know the audience so that there is an interplay,” Woolf said.
• Case the place. “Find out what kind of facility you will be in,” Lowenstein said. Discuss location, room size, equipment availability and parking. If students sit in desks in rows, will there be room to watch your demonstration up close? Talk about lighting, acoustics and temperature. Make a Plan B to anticipate faulty equipment.
• Make real-world connections. An important mission is to show kids how your career relates to what you learned in school. Save the bragging for cocktail parties. Your aim here is to inspire kids.
• Gear your talk to the group. The easiest way to make sure you aren’t speaking over the students’ heads is to type a sample paragraph on your computer, then check the “grade level score” feature found in popular word processing software. Don’t hesitate to toss in an occasional big word, but explain it and don’t be pompous. “You have to be real. Kids are incredibly sensitive to hooey,” Woolf said.
• Grab their attention up front. “Do a lot of personality,” says Young. Author Sallie Lowenstein disarms kids with conversations about books they hated.