Good communication skills are one of the critical aspects of personality development. Participating in public speaking is a great way kid can develop good communication skills and self-confidence.
Public speaking from a young age teaches children the art of expressing themselves effectively and maintaining their composure while facing an audience. Various activities help children overcome their fear of public speaking while they enjoy themselves.
For some children, public speaking comes naturally, while others need some practice to gain confidence. Here are four fun activities that you and your children can do together to practice:
Public Speaking Games for Kids
Play these fun and quirky public speaking games with your children to improve their communication, exercise their imagination, and develop their skill:
Observe the Journey
When driving or walking, ask your child to describe their surroundings in English as best as possible within one minute. This game teaches children to articulate their sentences and sharpens their observations.
The Cooperation Game
This game is played among three children. Each child says one sentence to build a story, and the catch is that the story has a pre-determined ending such as, “… and thus the pigeon was awarded a medal.” This game teaches children to think on their feet and allows them to practice elocution.
The Noun Game
Have a group of children pick three nouns. The speaker will be given one minute to deliver a speech or tell a story that connects all three nouns.
Alternative Ending
Pick a movie or a TV show that your child is familiar with and ask them to come up with an alternative ending to the story.
How it Got its Name
Pick a random item in the room (e.g. a lamp) and ask children to imagine how it got its name and tell the story to an audience. Thinking of innovative reasons how something gets its name will help children think out-of-the-box. This is an essential aspect of public speaking for kids.
Presentations
Ask your child to deliver a small presentation about their favourite movie, cartoon, or book. Knowing that they need to talk about their favourite will enthuse the child into making a presentation and inspire them to do their best. To make it even more interesting, you can ask children to make presentations on topics such as
“Why my bedtime should be moved to 10:00 PM instead of 9:00 PM?”
or
“3 Reasons why we should eat chocolate every day.”This will allow them to present their views about an issue that they are genuinely interested in. If need be, motivate them by offering a prize such as a dessert on a weeknight or a movie night on Friday. In the future, they will need to make presentations on many occasions. Public speaking games like this help make children comfortable in speaking or presenting to an audience.
Transitioning Practice Using Story Cards
The transitioning game is a fun public speaking activity wherein children are given two words on cards. They need to tell a story connecting the words. Give the child a time limit and allow their imagination to run wild.
Playing such a game with their family helps children overcome their hesitation of speaking to an audience.
They feel comfortable telling a story that they make up on their own, and this gives them a chance to practice speaking in English in an informal setting.
The transitioning with story cards game is fun to play for children of all ages. The transitioning game with story cards improves expression, fluency, and imagination to develop public speaking skills for kids.
Create Your Advertisement
Also known as the Ad-Mad game, this is an activity that is funny and enjoyable for everyone in the family. This game not only improves confidence in children but also helps in public speaking for kids.
Think of quirky products and write these names on chits.
Ask children to pick a product and enact a short television advertisement about it.
This game involves acting skills, writing skills, imagination and public speaking skills for kids.
Besides these at-home activities, you can also consider signing up your child for public speaking classes for kids. These classes and sessions are a great way to expose and train children in the different aspects of speaking in front of an audience.
At PlanetSpark, our experts know exactly what to do with your kids and how to best train different types of children to bring out the best of them.
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