Teaching gifted children about speaking skills is necessary. Students who are gifted are not necessarily great speakers. Great speakers require training and a focus on speech skills. Here are some speech teaching ideas to use with gifted students to improve their skills.
Brainstorm Good Speech Skills
One of the first speech teaching ideas is to ask gifted students to brainstorm a list of good speaking skills. Ask them what are some good speaking skills? Who do they know that is a good speaker? What makes them a good speaker? When teaching gifted children, these students can often come up with their own examples and criteria with just a little guidance from you. Once they have a list of good speech skills, you can make a class list to display in the gifted classroom.
Choose Easy Topics
With this speech teaching idea, gifted students will focus on a topic they already know a lot about when giving their speeches. The important thing about this speech is not the content--it's a chance for gifted students to practice good speech skills. Since you are teaching gifted children, you probably have students that have already investigated the topics they are most interested in. Ask them to write a short speech about these topics; explain to students that you want them to be extremely comfortable with their topic, so they can focus on their speech-giving skills.
Videotape the Speeches
If you have access to videotaping equipment while teaching gifted students, this is the best way for them to evaluate their own speech-giving skills such as pacing, hand motions, clear speech, and emphasis on important parts. Videotape each of your gifted students giving their speeches. After the speech is over, one of the best speech teaching ideas is to ask other students to tell what the speaker did well. Positive reinforcement as soon as the speech is over helps students feel more comfortable about giving future speeches.
Self-evaluations
The last one of the speech teaching ideas is to ask students to watch their videotaped speech and fill out a self-evaluation on their speech skills. You want them to watch for the criteria they decided makes a good speaker. You can have them fill out comments about each criteria or rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 4. You know your gifted students best, and so you will know what type of evaluation will work for them.
After gifted students have completed their self-evaluations, they should create goals to work on for their next speech such as: I will concentrate on not saying, "Ummmm," whenever I am pausing while giving a speech.