Fun Speech Activities for Kids

Encourage your students to be confident young speakers.

Speech activities are often the bane of any child's education. We've all been there, dreading them and sweating it out beforehand. However, they are a vital aspect of education. It is imperative that we create exciting activities that encourage our young people to happily and articulately present their ideas.

Sports Commentary

Provide your class with inspirational ideas to get them started.

In this activity, ask your class to produce a sports commentary. While this may be ideal for a class who are predominantly boys, girls can enjoy this just as much if given time and choices. Give the class time on the computers to collect sound effects and images and it becomes an IT project, too. This sort of task is great for focusing children's use of language: for example, they must use adverbs throughout their commentary. This could be a group or individual task.

Modernizing Stories

Give them the chance to express themselves as someone else.

Dramatic presentations are an excellent way to encourage whole-class participation. These activities are best carried out in small groups of about 3 to 5 students and enable shy students to feel more secure while standing with their friends in front of a room of people. A favorite drama activity is to take an old story and ask the groups to produce a modern dramatization of it. For example, a modernized version of Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale" allows the boys to play-fight and the girls to swoon. A lot of students will feel happier performing as someone else in front of their class. Once the students have finished, watching their performances can be a lot of fun, too. After watching the presentations, ask the other students to comment on their friends' work; this will encourage them to be reflective learners and to consider their own areas for improvement.

PowerPoint Poetry

Ask the class to select images that they think represent a poem's ideas.

If you are studying poetry with your class, ask them to engage with the subject matter by offering their own interpretations. Working individually, in pairs or in small groups, the students prepare a PowerPoint presentation of images that they think represent the various lines of a poem. Once they've created their presentation, they present it to their class and explain their choices and interpretations. This exercise allows the students to interact with poetry in such a way that it allows them to feel self-assured about what they are saying to their class, and they won't forget the poem in a hurry, either. Many examples of similar work exist on YouTube; try searching for a poem used in your school and see what comes up.

Familiar Topics

Family means security, and this will help a child to speak publically.

Experience tells us that people talk most easily about the topics they know the most about. Therefore, a good topic for a class to talk about is their families. This project is an effective ice breaker at the start of the year. Depending on their ability, give children free reign to present it in their own way. They could use PowerPoint or Prezi (an interactive presentation website) or a slideshow of photos; giving them free reign will enable them to become independent learners. The students will feel secure because of their familiarity with their topic.

References

• TES Connect: Teaching Resources: Speaking & Listening

Resources

• YouTube: Poetry Videos
• Prezi