Activities to Improve Communication Skills in Kids: How Can Games Improve Communication Skills?
Are your kids scoring well in their language papers, but still struggle at public-speaking? The reason may be too much focus on the academics of your child, and not on their overall growth. In a world like today, books may not be enough to learn something new, especially in the case of the communication skills of your child. Apart from books and school lessons, there are various means of communication activities for kids that can prove more efficient for them.
Why are Communication Activities for Kids Essential?
Not every child feels engaged in a book and may need something more than words on a paper. If you are still prioritising books and academics for your child’s communication skills, then you may not find the results for a very long time.
Some kids feel more engaged in communication games than books.
Communication games provide kids with an environment where they are free to make mistakes, and thus, this helps them to learn at a better pace.
Communication games not only develop communication skills but also develop interpersonal skills like emotional intelligence, caring, body language and others.
Kids with better communication skills express their ideas better than the kids who are only academically good.
What are Some Activities to Improve Communication Skills for Kids?
Students of different age groups need different levels of communication games. Communication skill activities for kids put the whole classroom in an engaging environment, where each and every student participates. The teamwork and challenging environment keeps encouraging them to perform better. Read some interesting and fun communication games in the article below:
Communication Games for Middle School Kids
1. Back-Back
This game helps in developing the listening and speaking skills of the players involved. The game involves a pair of students, in which one listens and the other follows. It can be done in the following manner:
Ask the pair of students to sit back-to-back so that they don’t see each other.
Then ask one of the students to describe a drawing, a picture, or an object which the other student will try to recreate or answer what that thing is.
The same activity can also be done through a paper-folding game, where one student will describe it, and the other will fold the paper that way.
2. Role Playing
This game assesses and improves the student’s communication skills at a quite higher level. Students can perform the role playing game in the following manner:
Divide your students into pairs and ask them to role-play random individuals like their teachers or parents.
Ask them questions related to their roles.
Provide them with situations to see how they would act and communicate in that situation.
Analyse their wordings, body language, and confidence level.
3. Picture-Telling
This game involves picture-description, which helps the kids develop their analysing skills as well. Perform the game by:
Hand out a variety of random pictures to your students, which can be simple as well complex. You can also make levels.
Set a time-limit, and ask them to describe it within that time.
Students learn how to analyse and organise their thoughts in a limited time period.
You can do the same for the writing skills by giving them a written picture-description test.
To make it more engaging, you can split the students into teams and award them points accordingly. This will encourage them to perform better.
4. Movement Sticks
Since body-language is a form of communication skill, this game is meant to improve the body language of students. For this you’re required to:
Divide students into pairs.
Place two sticks between the fingers of the pairs and ask them to move across the classroom without dropping the sticks.
In order to keep all the focus on the body language of students, any kind of verbal communication should be avoided.
5. Stand Up for Fillers
We often add fillers to our speech when we have to fill up the silent spaces, but the utterances like, “um,” “uh”, “so,” or “right” makes you look nervous and less confident. The stand-up filler is made to avoid such fillers. The game is played by:
Giving each student a topic on which they are asked to speak for 1-3 minutes.
The game starts when the student starts speaking, and the rest of the students stand-up on hearing the fillers.
The class listens and the speaker becomes hyper-aware of the words they are using. The standing-up of the whole class becomes a deliberate shock to the speaker, and this makes them become more conscious of the words used.
6. Blindfold Game
This game improves the understanding element of students while communicating. The game involves a blindfolded student performing according to the words of another student. For this:
Create obstacles with everyday items in the classroom.
Divide students into two or more groups.
One person in each group will remain blindfolded, while the rest of the group communicates instructions on how to navigate through the classroom without getting touched by the obstacles.
This activity will push their communication skills to accuracy. However, always keep a student near the blindfolded person to avoid any accidents during navigation.
7. Find It Together
This is another blindfold activity where you are needed to:
Divide the group into pairs in which one of the students remains blindfolded.
Then the job of the other student becomes to navigate the blindfolded student to find specific objects from a designated circle.
This game requires effective communication skills between the students to accomplish the goals.
It is teamwork done through effective communication skills.
We often assume that high school students are already well-versed in their communication skills, but lack of communication skills is a major problem among high-schoolers when it comes to competitive stages and public-speaking. We cannot already believe that high scholars do not require any communication activities and games, hence the following communication activities will help the high-school students to practice their communication skills.
This activity aims at improving a student’s confidence in public speaking.
Class is divided into groups, then one of the students is chosen as a leader who comes up with a situation like “Tell me about the time when you forgot maths book for class”.
Then one of the students is made to answer the question in a 3-4 minutes speech.
Silent Take
A nonverbal activity is performed in class, where every student is aware of each other.
The class is divided into pairs.
One student in each pair is asked to act about something or some situation, while the other needs to guess what they are doing, describing it in words.
Just Listen
It is a listening game to enhance comprehension.
One individual only listens to the other without speaking or interrupting, letting them talk about anything they want.
In the end, the listener is asked to summarise the whole story or answer questions related to it.
Who Am I?
Involves a question game to make the whole class engage in a communication activity.
You are required to put sticky notes with any noun on it, such as the name of a famous person or animal, and stick them on students’ foreheads without them seeing the writing.
Each of the remaining students will come and describe the related thing to that noun so that the student with the sticky note on the forehead answers the question “who I am?”.
Debates:
Split the class in two and present them a point of discussion.
One group should agree with the idea, and another should speak about the opposition to that idea.
Time is given to prepare in groups and have a debate on the issue. This one is a great example of communication skills group activities.
Conclusion:
Effective communication is the key to expression. Students who lack expression struggle in almost every field. Teachers, as well as parents, should focus on the communication skills of the students as much as they do on their academic skills.
Communication games for kids can prove to be an effective way of developing their communication skills from a very early age. For more informative blogs on the holistic development of your child, follow The Real School Of Montessori, where we have devised 100+ communication-centric activities to help kids develop a reading routine and enhance their debating and persuasive speaking skills.