Teaching Speech Skills to Gifted and Elementary Students

One of the first speech teaching ideas is to ask students to brainstorm a list of good speech skills. Ask them what are some good speech skills? Who do they know what makes a good speaker? What makes them a good speaker? When teaching gifted children or children in the regular elementary classroom, 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 classroom. Refer to this class list often whenever you are assigning a speech or oral presentation to students.

With this speech skills teaching idea, 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 students to practice good speech skills. Since may be teaching gifted children as well as students from the regular elementary classroom, 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 skills. Students should turn into you the topics that they are planning for their speeches.

If you have access to videotaping equipment while teaching speech skills, this is the best way for students to evaluate their own speech-giving skills such as pacing, hand motions, clear speech, and emphasizing on important points. Videotape each of your students giving their speeches. After the speech is over, one of the best speech teaching ideas is to ask other students to tell the speaker what he or she did well. Positive reinforcement as soon as the speech is over helps students feel more comfortable about giving future speeches. As the teacher, you can provide feedback on what students can improve. You can also ask them to watch the videotape and ask students to look for their own strengths and weaknesses (see the next section).

The last one of the speech skills 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. They can fill out comments about each criteria or rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 4. You know your students best, and so you will know what type of evaluation will work for them.

After 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 during a speech.

Speech skills are not easy to learn, so make each speech opportunity a learning opportunity.