Activities to Improve Speech

What can we do to keep our children's speaking skills improving while out of school? - Summer Help
Answer:We recommend a lot of talking to improve your children's speaking skills. How well your children can speak in school influences their participation in classroom discussions and their ability to give oral reports. Confident speakers tend to get higher grades because their verbal skills impress their teachers.
Preschool and Kindergarten
--Have your young children practice telling you their names, addresses, telephone numbers and how to contact you. Then let them have fun with this information by recording and listening to it.
--Instead of reading a familiar story to your children, take turns telling the story.
--Stop while reading a story and ask your children what they think will happen next.
Elementary School
--As a speech icebreaker at the dinner table, play games. You might have everyone ask questions to guess the name of an object in the room or of a family friend, relative or famous person.
--Using paint and scraps of material around the house, have your children dress up their fingers as different characters in their favorite stories. Then have them use their finger puppets to act out the story for friends or other family members.
Middle School and Beyond
--Encourage your children to talk with adults in your family about their recollections of landmark events in their lives. They will also be learning a bit of history as they talk about such things as the first landing on the moon, Pearl Harbor, Sept. 11 and Vietnam.
--At the dinner table, have everyone, including parents, narrate their daily experiences in sequential order. This could become a favorite family nighttime routine.