by Deborah J Block, Certified Etiquette Consultant
Many people have a fear of public speaking. With a little practice it can become more natural. Here are a few fun ice breaker exercises that can make public speaking easier and more natural. These are particularly helpful for kids.
1. Make A Commercial
Get a bunch of things from your room or from your house, bring them in and you need to make a commercial about these items. Someone is giving a random product. It might be a deodorant, might be an iphone, it could be anything. And then they are required to give a 30 second to 1 minute commercial on this product and talk about why this is so awesome and why people should buy it. So that’s a really fun one as well.
2. Random Nouns
You can do this by either putting nouns on key cards shuffling them up and picking 2 up at a time or you can use this random noun generator. You get 2 nouns and you then have to create a story that connects those 2 nouns. It might be ‘a sheep’ and ‘a mechanic’ or it could be ‘friend’ and ‘shoelace’. Then you have to create a story that connects those 2 nouns together.
3. Which Is a Lie?
This one is generally pretty easy to work out and a lot of fun as well. And you will find that some students do it really well, but then some students just fumble when they are trying to lie and its quite humorous to watch. A person gets up and tells 3 truths about themselves, but 2 of them need to be true and one of them needs to be a lie. So they get up and they tell 3 things about themselves and then the audience needs to choose which one was a lie and they see if they were correct.
4. Make Your Own Definitions Speaking Game
Get really big words that nobody really knows what the meaning is. You can do this using this big word generator or another tool (just Google it). Or you can just go through the dictionary and pick some strange ones yourself. The speaker has to get up – they are given this strange word and they need to with confidence tell the class what this word means. Obviously they are making it up, but they need to do it confidently. https://www.wordgenerator.net/random-word-generator.php
5. A. Interview Introductions
The exercise has them finding out about each other and then introducing the person they interviewed to the whole group. As it's a lot less threatening or scary to talk about someone else rather than yourself, you'll find people respond really positively as they're generally eager to represent the person they interviewed well.
Divide your group into pairs. Each person interviews the other in turn. The information gained forms the basis of a brief introduction speech they'll give to the whole group when the interviewing process is complete. Allow 5 minutes per person.
Ask them to find out their partner's name, where they live/work, what hobbies they have, what their favorite book, film, song...is, what they're most proud of (an achievement perhaps), what they hope for from the class, something funny that happened in their childhood, where they go for holidays, what they think about the latest local issue, etc...
B. My Friend’s Fictional Life
In this activity, what you do is you get up in front of people and you take one of your friends and you introduce them. However, instead of introducing them in the normal way you make up a fictional life for them. So you say, hi this is Jane Smith, and she actually moonlights as a jazz pianist for the underground mafia. And you talk about her life, whatever it may be. So this is fun because it makes you been creative, it’s very easy to think of these things on the spot and just roll with it. It’s generally pretty funny as well.
6. Picture Prompts
- Pick any picture, like the one above, and ask:
- Who? (Who is this child? Who are her parents? Who is she running away from?)
- What? (What is she doing? What's the name of the plush toy she's carrying?)
- When? (When did this happen?)
- Why? (Why is this child out on the road by herself with her toy?)
- Where? (Where is this? Where are her parents?)
- How? (How is this story likely to end? How does this child feel?)
- Same picture. Different story: This time all the people in your group are going to use exactly the same picture. And each one will tell a different story.
Sources:
https://slightlyunconventional.com/fun-public-speaking-activities/
https://www.write-out-loud.com/picture-prompts-for-impromptu-speeches.html