Introduction
Public speaking is a crucial skill that equips kids with the ability to express themselves confidently. It may also help a child form some very meaningful relationships in life and inculcate leadership qualities. In today's world, clarity of expression and speech serves as an important parameter in facilitating professional success. When a child is encouraged to step out and speak in front of people, it cultivates an inherent professional understanding among them. Public speaking also includes the knowledge of the right body posture and hand movements. While addressing a crowd, a kid must try to keep all the body parts in resonance with the content that they're speaking. During the process of selecting the right activities for kids to enhance their public speaking skills, parents may consider some important requisites. This includes choosing activities that have persuasive techniques, relevant structures, and use language to effectively make a child understand what to do. Such activities may put the kid on the right path toward self-discovery, empowerment, and confidence building.
Speaking Activities for Kids to Improve their Communication Skills
Here is a list of some speaking activities and games for kids to help them improve their communication skills.
Show and Tell
This is one of the easiest and most basic ways of working on your child's communication skills. All you must do is simply pick up an object from your surroundings. It can be a water bottle, a toy, a plant, or any other thing. Now make your child observe this object for a couple of minutes before asking them to speak at least five lines about the object. During the time allotted to the child to think, they get the ability to frame sentences in their mind while critically analyzing the object that has been kept before them. You may also assist them with their sentences and introduce new words to them during this activity.
Feelings Corner
A very important aspect of learning communication is the ability to understand one's emotions. Emotions are not tangible and can only be felt, which is why self-reflection and differentiating between emotions are important for kids. Feelings Corner is an active practice in which you may allot different corners of the house to specific feelings.
For example, the balcony area may be allotted to sad emotions. This means that whenever a child feels sad, they can sit on the balcony and analyze their emotions while indulging in listening to music or reading a book. This activity can help the child structure their emotions and avoid feeling misunderstood or overwhelmed.
Finish the Rhyme
Rhymes and songs can be of substantial use to parents to make a child learn new words and phrases. Parents can introduce different types of rhymes to their kids to make them learn sentences, structures, and grammatical rules as well. A fun exercise that can be formed around rhymes for kids is giving kids the opportunity to form their original rhymes. Parents can start by giving an easy poem cue to the child and encourage them to finish the rhyme. Initially, you may let them finish the poem without following a rhyming scheme. Slowly, you may introduce rhyming words and explain to them what a rhyming scheme means.
Storytelling
Storytelling is an activity where a child thinks authentically and creatively to formulate a story and deliver it in a rather intriguing and engaging fashion. It's not only limited to imagination and a child's ability to write well but also focuses on delivery and speech clarity. An interesting storytelling activity may involve showing a particular object or a picture to a child and encouraging them to formulate a story around it. The parents may also give a brief queue to the child to start the story such as, ‘Once upon a time there lived a boy in the mountains.’ Listening to this, the kid can continue the story on their own.
Guess the Object
In this game, instead of asking the child to describe an object that is shown to them, the child has to guess the object based on the description that is provided to them. It's a great way to work on a child's critical thinking and problem-solving skills while checking their observation and mental presence. You may start by describing common things that are present around a child, such as their school bag, their toys, the clothes that they wear for anything that they may be able to answer easily. Slowly take this exercise to the next level by including more difficult questions. Through hearing multiple descriptions, the child also learns new words and sentence framing patterns.
Charade
Charade is an impeccable and highly effective communication-enhancing game. It requires the kid to play the role of a certain person in a hypothetical situation. The kid has to indulge in continuous dialogue delivery and answer as per the perception and position of the character that they have been allotted. Some of the most common charade premises for kids can be grocery stores, vegetable markets, bank employees and customers, and much more.
Conclusion
Clarity in communication allows a child to put forward their point of view and everyday issues explicitly. It also helps in developing reasoning skills among kids so that they can logically back up their opinions while expressing themselves. Clarity of speech not only helps a child in the academic domain but also ensures that they have a satisfactory experience in their social and professional life in the future.
Refernces
Pakhi’s deep interest in writing is influenced by her love for cinema and fiction books. Being a literature graduate, she is relentlessly inspired by different storytelling techniques to craft her work and bring a fresh perspective to the table. Having studied psychology, she also loves to explore various psychological insights related to kids’ and parents’ behavior to create engaging content pieces. Apart from that, she enjoys jamming to some great R&B music in her leisure time.
The views expressed are that of the expert alone.
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