Is it your kid’s turn to prepare and give a speech? This article offers a few useful tips in this direction. To know how you can help your kid draft and present a speech, read on…

Apart from sign language, speaking is the simplest, most natural and effective way of expressing ourselves. Speaking comes naturally to most of us, but ‘public speaking’ is an acquired skill. We speak in order to communicate with each other, with the intention of exchanging ideas, opinions, and feelings. But for some individuals, uttering even a simple request such as “Could you please direct me to the post office?”, could prove to be a source of anxiety. For such people, speaking in front of a group of people could be quite difficult. While communicating with others, how confident the speaker is matters very much. The same is true for your kid.

Though kids are fearless and brave, they might need some tips and lots of support from you, when it comes to public speaking. You might want to start with a few activities that will develop your kid’s public speaking skills. These activities will give your child a fair idea about public speaking, and some practical experience too. Given below are a few tips to help improve and sharpen your kid’s public speaking skills.

Break the Ice
If your child is shy about speaking out or sharing his ideas, then this is a good exercise for him. Go to an open place with an uninterrupted view of the horizon. Ask your child what he thinks about the point, where the sky seems to be touching the earth. Listen carefully to what he says. Let his answer develop into a discussion. If you live in a city and it is difficult to find an uninterrupted view of the sky, or you’re very busy and have no time to go outdoors, then consider the next exercise. Ask your child, if he can pick up water with his fingers. When he says no, take some water and put some color in it. Put the colored water in the refrigerator. After some time, when it has turned into the colored ice cube, ask him to pick it up. This will provoke a discussion about the different states of water. You could conduct many more interesting experiments that will fire up your child’s imagination and encourage questions and conversation. It is well-known that one has to struggle very hard at the beginning. A satellite-carrying rocket struggles, till it reaches escape velocity. One has to overcome inertia before things starts moving. So, keep at it and don’t give up.

Observation
This can begin right at home. Ask your child to spend some time observing the family members, including you. The way they move, act and talk, while expressing themselves. Help him in comparing the behavior of different personalities. Your kid will come to know that behavior differs from individual to individual. The time is ripe to find out why he does not open up and share his thoughts; what is holding him back from expressing himself. Observing people will help him get an idea of how to behave and talk in a group of people. It will also reassure him that other people will accept his behavior as normal.

Subject of the Speech
Help your kid write a speech. Pick an interesting topic or just go with the one that has to be dealt with. Discuss the subject with him. Explore it, in general. If you are taking notes for him, instead of putting your own views in the speech, prefer to jot down his ideas. Pay attention to and give preference to his use of words, sentence structure, if it is logical and suitable. Encourage him to take the lead in the discussion. Draw him out. Lend him an ear and listen to him speak. The battle is half won.

Self-test
This is an exercise that your kid can do on his own, if he wants to. He will be the speaker, as well as the judge. It may take a while and few repeats to go through this test and master it. After all, during this test, the kid will have to tackle the most critical judge and audience. Guess who?

Tape Recorder Test
The most infuriating characteristic of the spoken word is that it vanishes without leaving a trace. If you need to know what you said or how you sounded to the world, there is no way of finding out. But, preparation for public speaking gives you the chance to record your words and listen to them over and over, till you have perfected what you should say and how you should say it. Let your kid record his speech with the help of a tape recorder. Afterward, press the play button to listen to the speech. If there are mistakes, explain them to your child, so that they can be corrected. This exercise will help him realize what he sounds like, while giving the speech. If sounds such as ‘er’ or ‘um’ are ruining the presentation, help him to control or cut down on them.

Mirror Test
The mirror never lies or judges. But, it reflects and reveals. This exercise will work better, if your kid does it on his own. Having surpassed the self-test and the tape recorder, your child is now ready to face the mirror. All he has to do is give his speech, in front of the mirror. During this test, he will be able to perform as well as observe what kind of performance he is giving. The mirror will reveal how the presentation will go down with the real spectators. Mannerisms and habits to control or get rid of, would be exposed by the mirror.

The next step would be to perform in front of the family. Now is the time to judge, how good he is. Is the performance up to the mark…? If not, no problem. Try again. This way the kid will be able to find his mistakes without having to pay for it in terms of taunts, etc. from a harsh audience. Public opinion is a hard nut that very few can crack, eat and digest. If the performance is good, then appreciate your kid’s public speaking skills with a “Wow” and “Well done!”

At this stage, your kid would have achieved what you set out to do. The goal was to make him feel confident. Now, your child knows he can do it. This knowledge is the key to his success. It is said that “If you feel confident, you will act confident”. But, where does this confidence to make a speech come from? It comes with practice and patience; work on the mistakes and problem areas, till they are completely gone. Ask your kid, if he feels confident about giving the talk. If he says yes, then believe him; he can do it!

Everyone is a member of society. We need to interact with others, even while performing simple tasks. Speaking is a simple way of communicating. If above tips fails in producing desired results, try public speaking courses for your kid which will benefit him in every aspect of life.

By Shrinivas Kanade
Last Updated: 10/11/2011

Public speaking is an art of delivering a speech with clarity, logic, confidence and conviction. Here are a few public speaking activities that will help you and help your child deal with fear of public speaking forever and ever!

We’ve all been there and done that. Yet, for most of us, public speaking remains a nerve-racking activity. Despite hours of practice, the sight of a stage, sends shivers down the spine and we find ourselves in a conundrum of thoughts. The main reason for goofed up public speaking episodes, is because we get overwhelmed by the audience and their capacity to judge us. Public speaking activities, cannot be ignored, as it is a very important skill. If the fear of public speaking is not dealt with early, in childhood, it may persist to cause problems of socializing and of being accepted in social circles, later in life. Here are a few public speaking activities, week by week, for you, to build confidence in your child.

Public Speaking Activities

Introduction
One of the simplest public speaking activities for students begins with introducing themselves. As freshers in the school environment, children are apprehensive about going to school. On the first day of school, conduct a small introduction session. Ask the children to walk up to the front of the class, introduce themselves by saying their names, describe the clothes they are wearing, thank everyone for listening, and then return to their place. You could begin this activity, by introducing yourself as their teacher. Instruct the children to emulate you, and coax them if they fumble. Cheer every kid with nice comments, as it boosts their moral and assures them of their act. Read more on public speaking for kids.

Interviewing
Once, the children are familiar with each other after the introduction, conducting interviews can be done in the following week. Activities for public speaking will help your child be insightful about people and objects around him/her, with the interviewing technique. In this public speaking technique, divide the children into pairs. Every child has to ask the partner questions to find out 3 striking points. Once they are done with the interview, ask every pair to come up onstage, one by one, and talk about the striking points for 2-3 minutes. These points can be fictional or funny, as long as they reveal something about the partner.

Personal Details
By now, your students or children must be quite friendly, considering that they’ve worked as partners. This makes this exercise the obvious next move. Talking about personal details is one of the best public speaking exercises for conducting public speaking activities for adults. For this exercise, the adult or the student has to make a small write up about personal details, memorize and then speak about them in front of the class. This way, one learns to open up to the audience, fearlessly. Students can narrate a funny, embarrassing, tragic, moving, exciting or an interesting incident about themselves.

One Act Play
A little drama is always good fun to learn expression and build up confidence. In the fourth and the final week, give your students exactly five minutes, to do this exercise. Every child has to demonstrate a skill or a latent talent in front of the class. The child can do this public speaking activity with a prop, or without a prop. Say, the child gets a toy from home, and talks about it for five minutes. If a child is good at singing, then the child sings with a few histrionics. These gesticulations and histrionics are way of teaching the child to do multiple things at a time, without losing the focus.

Read more on

• Overcoming Fear of Public Speaking
• Nervousness and Public Speaking

Public speaking activities are not just about talking, it’s more about constructing a logical sequence to every statement and putting them across in a way that your audience understands it. It is more about organizing your speech and delivering it with confidence and conviction. I hope, these public speaking activities help you to help your child!

By Mukta Gaikwad

Does the thought of going up on stage and making a speech scare you beyond words? This is obviously affecting the way in which you function, correct? There is only one way to deal with this one and that is to learn how to overcome speech anxiety. In the following article, we will look through the varied ways in which this can be done. Continue reading for more information.

The crowd it cheered for the prefect to come up on stage and announce the yearly academic prizes. As he straightened his tie to get up there on that hot morning, there was a sudden slumping noise and then commotion. The prefect had suffered a sunstroke and had fallen over. Water was brought and people bent over in trying to revive him. And I? I found myself with a huge wad of notes of the speech that he was going to deliver. Someone said I had to take over since I was next in line. But, the mere thought of going up on stage and making a speech in front of the chief guest, the dignitaries and 500 odd students was enough to turn my feet ice-cold, to make my heart race like a thousand horse hooves over the ground and for a general surreal feeling of being stuck in a vacuum to come about.

My speech anxiety had already caught up with me.

Identify with the feeling? Speech anxiety (Glossophobia) is one of the most common forms of anxiety that people suffer from, did you know? And what is rather incredulous to note is a study that shows that Americans are severely more anxious about speaking in public than facing death. To feel anxious before any important event is a given, but when that fear turns into something more intense and brings with it certain symptoms, then we can term it as being a speech anxiety. Which of course puts us to question how to overcome speech anxiety. But before that, let us learn something more about what speech anxiety entails, its causes and symptoms and how to overcome the same.

What is Speech Anxiety?

Speech anxiety is the general fear of public speaking that people develop. In its extreme forms, it is taken as a social phobia whereby people develop the intense fear of facing an audience and speaking. Why? Because they convince themselves of the fact that if they speak in public, they will bungle up the speech in one way or the other by forgetting something important, fumbling with the words and making a fool of themselves, or worse still, not being able to convey what they want to. It is the fear of undergoing an embarrassment that causes for this phobia to come about. But, why does a person end up feeling this way? There could be several causes of speech anxiety. What are the causes that lead to a fear of public speaking? Let us get into details of the same in the following section.

Speech Anxiety – Causes

• The fear of failure that leads to anxiety symptoms to make way. Which over time, leads to speech anxiety.
• An earlier failure in course of public speaking that has led to the conditioning of the mind to associate public speaking with failure, and therefore, the tendency to avoid the same comes about.
• Less preparation of the speech that causes for the anxiety of failure.
• A person, who has low self-esteem and keeps feeding himself with negative and self depreciating thoughts (to the likes of him not succeeding at all) will find that he is setting himself up for failure and that is what will lead to speech anxiety.
• The nature of the audience can also lead to developing these feelings. If the audience is hostile, restless or seems disinterested in what the person is saying and the orator catches on to this, it could lead to the development of the symptoms of social anxiety. Similarly an unfamiliar environment or a very large audience could lead to feelings of the same.
• If a person has never spoken in a public arena before, it could definitely lead to the emergence of speech anxiety.

Speech Anxiety – Symptoms

• A cracking of the voice that lends to an uneven voice quality and lowered volume.
• There is an increase in the heart rate, pulse rate and blood pressure as well.
• Excessive sweating also comes about as a general rule. The hands and feet will get sweaty and sticky.
• The throat feels scratchy and dry and you keep feeling thirsty that no amount of water can eliminate.
• A person starts stammering and stuttering along with fumbling in his speech.
• A person gets very restless and fidgety. Which is apparent in his stance and the way in which he moves.
• There might even be the emergence of nausea and shortness of breath.
• There could be chances that you’ll end up forgetting more of your speech.

How to Overcome Speech Anxiety?

It never is an ideal situation to be stuck with any kind of social phobia, in this case speech anxiety. It cripples and limits. That is why there is a need to undertake some measures to overcome this anxiety. What are the ways in which one can overcome this phobia? Here are some public speaking tips that will help.

Be Thorough in your Preparation
Understand the topic at hand completely. Find out all there is to find out about it. That way, if there is any doubt about the topic at hand, you can clear them and prepare a speech that is thorough and well researched. Making clear notes about the same is seen to help make the speech even better.

Know your Audience
How does knowing the audience help? Studying the audience helps because you know their general psyche, what they expect from the orator, what makes them tick and what doesn’t. This can be deduced from a number of factors like age, background and the like. Knowing the audience will help you formulate the speech to make maximum impact on them.

Practice in Different Scenarios
So, you know your matter and you know your audience and that will help you in perfecting the speech well. But to ensure that the speech goes according to how you have planned it, there has to be a lot of practice done. There are several ways in which this can be achieved. You can practice in front of a mirror to study and improve upon your style of delivery and body language. Another way to perfect your speech is to practice in front of a small audience of family members and friends so that they can give you a feedback when needed. Similarly you can either audio or video record your speech to check for the same and bring about a change.

Psyche yourself for Success
Some people are so tensed when giving a speech that they don’t realize it when they set themselves up for failure by constantly feeding their minds with things like ‘I am going to bungle this up’, ‘I’m going to forget my lines’ etc. Refrain from doing that and give yourself auto suggestions of succeeding at the task on hand instead. Keep telling yourselves that you are going to give a perfect speech and everyone is going to love it. This will add up to all the preparation and research that you’ve done and help you achieve your goal.

Usage of Props and Other Equipment
Another effective way in which you can tackle speech anxiety is by using different visual aids like charts, powerpoint presentations, slides, audio and video clips and the like. This works in two ways. One, it enhances the speech and gives it more character, and two, it reduces the actual speech time. One does not have to merely concentrate on the speech anymore and can use that time to explain the speech better with the help of the aforementioned props. This also helps the audience in understanding the speech better.

Use Relaxation Techniques
For all the physical and psychological symptoms that speech anxiety brings along, there needs to be a solution found. It has been studied that using relaxation techniques, which primarily focus on breathing exercises are known to reduce this anxiety and bring about calm. Some people will meditate, others will concentrate on deep breathing, still others will probably listen to a soothing song or take a walk. The point being that each one of us has to find a tool that helps us in relaxing and reducing considerably, if not completely, the speech anxiety that makes way.

When one poses a question to the likes of ‘How to overcome speech anxiety‘, it goes to show that they are serious about finding a solution. Let’s just say then that this is the best phase to be in because you are willing to do something about it and put in the required efforts to bring about positive results. With a comprehensive and detailed account of this phenomenon listed above, as well as the different tools to overcome the fear of public speaking provided for, one needs just make the effort and be persistent with it. That’s all. Then no stage will be a hurdle. Not really, not at all.

By Rujuta Borkar
Published: 5/4/2011