How to Develop Your Child’s Speaking Skills

In order to help your child express themselves clearly and form meaningful relationships, it is important to develop their speaking skills. Here are 3 tools that can help with this.

The environment

Surround your child’s environment with activities that encourage them to speak. You could set aside some “circle time” at the beginning of each day where children can share experiences, feelings, or simply play and interact with each other.

Another great way to help children interact with their environment is by arranging information on bulletin boards. Kids could simply read the words on the board at any time of the day. You could make your bulletin board look more appealing by adding pictures next to words. If the information looks too “wordy”, you could replace the words with appropriate pictures. For example, instead of writing “I like pizza”, you could write “I like (picture of pizza)”

Placing books within your child’s reach, in their environment, is another effective way to develop their speaking skills. Make sure they read aloud, and pay attention to their pronunciation and body language as they do.

A mirror could also greatly improve your child’s speaking skills. All you have to do is ask them to go up to the mirror and speak. Encourage them to express themselves using their facial expressions and body language too.

Time

Make sure to organize your time in such a way that it comprises about 70% speaking activities for kids at home, and 30% pre-writing games for kids like coloring or tracing. If all your time is spent teaching them to speak effectively, their enthusiasm will eventually run out. Remember to include playful activities at the start of your lessons to make them feel eager to learn too.

Feedback

Whether it’s feedback from the teacher or peers, it is an essential tool to foster speaking skills. The teacher must ensure that they have one-on-one interactions with students to give them descriptive feedback.

When it comes to feedback from peers, students could form pairs and tell each other what they liked the most about their speaking skills. The feedback must be constructive but not critical.