Speaking in Public is a difficult job and makes even adults feel shy and nervous. However harnessing your Child’s Public Speaking Skill is very important at a younger age because at some point of time, every individual needs to present him or her in public.
Hence, it is very important to train and prepare the kids to overcome their shyness and fear. As the child moves through each grade in school, the demand to speak more and express his ideas becomes a necessity. Here are a few tips to encourage your child to speak in public.
Proficiency Matters in Public Speaking
It requires minimum effort to speak in your mother tongue. This is because of your proficiency over the language. Similarly, if you want your child to talk, then develop his/her proficiency over that language.
An easy way to develop proficiency in a language is reading newspaper, make your child read one paragraph loudly, correct the pronunciations, if necessary. Show them where to pause and where to stop and so on. This, when practiced regularly would become a practice.
Encourage Your Child, Don’t Force
Encourage the child to observe things around him/her when they go out. Show them how to make a mental picture of the things they see, let them learn to concentrate more on smaller details. This will give a scope of widen their knowledge.
When your child asks some question, patiently answer them. If you avoid answering you may reduce their inquisitiveness which is detrimental to their growth. You could later ask him/her about their experiences and the things they observed when they went out. The art of describing things would be developed as they grow.
Play Way Learning to Better Public Speaking Skill
If you are going to forcefully make them develop public speaking skill, it will not give results. Instead, encourage the child to learn things through fun and play.
Invite the child’s friends and ask them to discuss or talk about things that are familiar to them. You do not have to always make them speak about popular topics, just ask them how a movie was, what they did at school or even how they felt while having his breakfast, writing his homework, how many days are there in a week. Anything for that matter.
Know How To Control Children In Public
Use Technology
With the advancement in technology and lots of content in the internet, you have lots of resources to encourage the child to speak in public.
You can show the videos of famous people giving a speech and explain them about how to stand, where they look when speaking and their general posture and so on. Make it fun, rather than boring them.
You can also record the speech of the child to correct his/her mistakes.
Practice, Practice, Practice
This is more or less a fun activity. You can ask the family members to act as audience and make the child talk about some topic. The child would be comfortable to some extent because the audience are familiar to him. Gradually, this can be developed to reduce fear.
Don’ts
- Surprise preparations will do no good to any child. So, avoid last minute preparations and prepare in advance.
- If the child does not perform well, or is feeling uncomfortable, do not threaten him/her. This will cause more harm than good.
- Encourage the child in a gradual manner. Rushing things would only make matters worse.
- Teach the child to correct the mistakes, if any, instead of criticizing them.
- The child improves the skills gradually. So, expecting a lot in the first few days won’t help.
Public speaking is an art. It is very important to encourage the child and allow them to develop gradually. Set a reasonable goal, encourage the child to achieve the goal, motivate and encourage positively.
Public speaking is a life skill, handle it with care!
