7 Creative Ways you can Help your Children Improve English Speaking Skills
If your children are learning English, chances are good that they’ll do a lot of classroom-style learning, with the teacher instructing and students repeating or responding to them. There will probably be a lot of written work. But they will need plenty of opportunities to practice speaking in order to truly become fluent English speakers. Even if you’re not completely fluent yourself, there are ways you can help them to improve every day.Here are seven fun things you can do to help your children improve English Speaking:
Read aloud
If they’re just starting to read, you may have to take the lead initially, but they’ll learn quickly through repetition and end up talking over you sooner than you think!
Reading out loud helps develop pronunciation and cadence (where the emphasis goes in a sentence or phrase). There’s no end to this habit: teens can read a chapter of a novel aloud to younger siblings or act out an epic poem at family gatherings.
Take them shopping with you
A wonderful way to help your children improve English Speaking is by taking them shopping 🙂 Let me explain.
If you live in an English-speaking place, ask them to interact with the sales staff (ask for prices of things, pay at the cash, etc.). If not, walk through the grocery store and name the fruits and vegetables, discuss what to make for dinner, describe the colors and shapes of things, and so on. This also works well in clothing shops.
The key to improving English speaking is having a lot of real life conversations. Shopping is a great way to do this.
Sing songs together
Whether nursery rhymes or rock and roll, singing is a great way to practice English. Pick a new song to learn together every week and sing it before bed, or as you walk to school, or when washing the dishes. Practice until you have all the words memorized and can pronounce them correctly.
Online video is also a fun way to help your children improve English Speaking using their senses. YouTube is a great resource for finding recordings of songs to play over and over, and there are lots of lyric websites to help confirm what the words are.
Movie night (with Q&A)
Watching English-language movies is good for exposure to new vocabulary words, but it’s not ideal for conversation practice, so add a discussion element.
After the movie, ask your child what new words they heard in the movie and what they think they mean. Then look them up in the dictionary together to confirm the answer. Ask them to tell you what they thought the funniest or saddest moments in the movie were, which character they liked the best and why, and what they will tell their friends about the movie. These are fun questions that will get your child chatting about the movie without feeling like boring homework.
Put on a puppet show
They don’t even have to be real puppets – you can use stuffed animals or dolls or even make figures out of construction paper and glue them to popsicle sticks. A cardboard box with a hole cut in the side makes a simple puppet theatre.
Write down a bunch of simple scenarios (such as “the dinosaurs go to the store” or “the animals escape from the zoo”) and put them in a bucket or hat, then pick one out at random and act it out with your child. The audience can be the rest of your family, the pets, or your friends. The important thing is that all voice acting must be done in proper English.
Ask three questions about their day
At the dinner table or before going to bed are the best times for this. You can decide what the questions should be, but they should not be the same every day so that the child doesn’t get in the habit of giving the same answers each day. They should also be open-ended (where the child cannot simply give a yes/no or one-word answer).
Some examples might be: What was the best part of your day today? What did you do today that you are proud of? What happened today that you might do differently next time?
If you want to help your children improve English Speaking, make this routine a daily habit. It will take only 10 minutes but the improvements you will see will be enormous.
Make up stories together
There are lots of age-appropriate ways to do this. With younger kids, you might alternate sentences, where you start (“Once there was a giant who needed new pants.”) and your child makes up the next sentence (“So he decided to go to the store.”) and you switch back and forth until the story comes to a logical or funny ending. Older children can make up stories from a simple prompt (tell me a story about a magical creature). The point is to get them to speak and use their imagination.
All of these techniques are simple, inexpensive, and easy to do no matter where you live or what else is going on, and will all help your children improve English Speaking naturally. Just be patient and persistent. Good luck!
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