English is one of the most important languages globally, and the need to know the language has increased too. The majority of the countries today use English as a standard language to communicate globally. With such importance, one’s command over the language will ultimately affect their employment opportunities, career, and success. Kids speaking English have more confidence in communicating from an early age. Hence, it is of utmost importance for parents to teach English from a very young age, and the practice should ideally start at home. But how to teach a child to speak in English?
Especially in non-native English speaking countries where people use their mother tongue to converse at home, speaking with them in English will make a huge difference, and they will learn the language soon and efficiently. In this article, we’ll look into some ways of teaching kids to speak English at home.
How to Speak English with Child at Home?
#1. Set a Routine
While trying to speak in English at home, it is important to have a particular time in the day where you would sit with your kid and converse only in English with concentration. You can do it in short spells of 15 minutes because kids’ attention span is usually very low. Engage the whole 15 minutes’ spell in English conversation and encourage your kids to reply in English. Doing the same activity every day might get monotonous for them. Hence, be ready with a few different activities every day, like debates, board games, and telling stories.
#2. Comic Books
Comic Books are an excellent way to make your kids speak English at home with you. Get comic books with a series of pictures with open space for kids to fill up with dialogues. Have a conversation with your kids, ask them what they think about those pictures, and help them fill up the empty dialogue boxes with English conversation. This will also help them improve their writing skills, creative thinking, and imagination power.
#3. Role Play
This role-play activity will not just improve their language skills but help them become more confident while speaking in public. You and your kid can take up different characters from their favourite cartoon or enact a conversation between a teacher and a student or two friends. The idea is to make conversations in English. You can also converse as a store employee and customer, delivery boy and a customer, and so on. Having these everyday conversations will help kids improve their quick thinking abilities and fluency in English.
#4. Word Games
During this activity, use different puzzles that come in kids’ magazines, newspapers, or online. With the little clues already given, help your kids to find answers. Once they discover the word, ask them to speak without a break on the same word for about a minute. Give them time to prepare because, without preparation, they will feel underconfident.
#5. Bedtime Stories
This is a great favourite for every child. But use this activity to help your kids improve in English. If you are reading a bedtime story for them before or after, ask them what you read for them the day before. Ask them to explain the story or any story that they remember. Converse with them about their favourite part of the story, the moral of the story, and how it applies to their day-to-day life situations.
Also read: Best Online Learning Apps for Toddlers: Does Your Phone have these Best Educational Apps?
#6. Watch English Cartoons
This is every child’s favourite form of entertainment. But, be careful of what they are watching. Switch them to watch English language cartoons. Make these cartoon sessions an activity that you can do with your kid and help them through the difficult part of the conversations. They will end up picking up good English Sentences from the cartoons.
#7. Art of Storytelling
Ask them to create stories. They may have already heard numerous stories from you. Hence, ask them to recreate their own story. If they have a hard time imagining one, ask them to tell you about what happened in their favourite cartoon, school, or in the park today, entirely in English. As this activity involves them talking for minutes continuously in English, they will get fluent in the language and even enjoy talking about the shows they like. Include this activity in your daily routine at a fixed time for better results.
#8. Other Activities
Apart from these, there are tonnes of other activities that will help you engage with your kids in English conversation. Some more of them are:
Telephone Conversations
Make your kids answer the phone calls. Make them talk to delivery agents, customer care service people in English to help inculcate the habit and confidence of speaking in English with outsiders.
Singing Songs and Rhymes
Humming your kids’ favourite English songs and rhymes aloud will help them pick on the language, sentences, and meanings.
Talk about their Day
After your kids are done with their school or with most of their day’s activities, ask them how their day was. Let them share their experiences in English and talk to them about your day too.
Show them Around
Kids have a natural curiosity about the world around them. Hence, if you are in a park, talk to them about plants, flowers, and the importance of nature. While travelling, introduce them to the local culture. You can even do all of this by sitting at home and watching pictures, videos, and movies on the internet.
Conclusion
Hope this article helped you on how to teach kids to speak in English. Learning to speak English is not an overnight journey and will definitely be challenging for young kids. It needs continuous practice for kids before they attain fluency.
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