Benefits of Speech and Drama Education for your child

Apart from being fun and entertaining activity, taking part in Speech and Drama classes actually have long-lasting benefits for your child’s development. At whichever age, and whether your child loves the limelight or tends to shy away from even a small audience, there are components of Speech and Drama classes that are bound to engage them and develop life skills that give them an edge over the rest.

Here are some examples of how Speech & Drama classes would benefit your child:

Improvement in English Language skills

The most apparent and sought-after benefit of attending Speech and Drama classes would be an improvement of your child’s speaking and presentation skills. Even without putting up a heavily-rehearsed play or performance in front of a large audience, your child would be consistently taking part in enjoyable activities that train and enhance his speech, improving on his diction, pronunciation, clarity and tone. With a variety of rich texts that he would be exposed to, his vocabulary would also be enhanced. Together with the confidence that builds up in these classes, it is reasonable to expect that his presentation skills would definitely improve as well.

Increase in Self-confidence

There will definitely be events in your child’s entire life that require him to address an audience, such as presenting a project, participating in a debate, or even giving a success speech. A Speech and Drama class would provide the safe, comfortable and encouraging environment for your child to develop his confidence. Your child would be exposed to a variety of different performance activities, for him to present his ideas and creativity to his classmates (who would turn into friends really soon!), and thus developing his confidence as the lessons progress.

Understanding of the body’s capabilities

With activities that train your child’s ability to control his movement, posture, and gesture, he would understand what his body is capable of, and how he could use it to his advantage in engaging an audience and delivering messages effectively to them in different situations.

As children engage in Speech and Drama activities and allow their imagination to lead them in their creative problem-solving, they will be inspired to imagine the impossible, enhancing their creative thinking skills. The benefits of creative thinking do not only apply to “artsy” circumstances, as creativity is needed even in the most non-artistic or most scientific situations, where one has to “think out of the box.” How else did scientists and inventors, across the history of mankind, come up with their epic discoveries?

Nurturing the Ability to Empathise

Being exposed to different characters from a spread of rich texts would allow your child to get a deeper understanding of the characters and situations these characters would encounter. Putting himself in the shoes of the characters he plays in scripts, novels and poems, and the experiences those characters undergo, he would be able to imagine going through the difficulties of another person. Eventually, Speech and Drama classes provide your child with the ability to empathise with other people whom he interacts with or thinks about.

As this article shows, Speech and Drama classes definitely offer sought-after benefits that would improve your child’s abilities – and this list is not exhaustive! If your child needs the little boost in confidence and skills that a Speech and Drama course can provide, now is the best time to do so as there is nothing to lose but plenty to gain!

1. Speech and drama improves your public speaking skills. Forcing yourself to speak in front of people will help you get better at it! Volume, enunciation, pitch, inflection – they come in handy in a professional setting.
2. You learn the value of teamwork. In a Drama environment, you learn to compromise and collaborate with many different kinds of people. Drama and Theatre people know — every individual is valuable, not just the stars.
3. You’ll gain confidence. The Drama environment is unique in that it supports and encourages participants to be weird and try new things, even if you make a fool of yourself. Learning to shed your ego is a skill few people are willing to commit to in the real world. You will find more success when you are conditioned to embarrass yourself a little to find it.
4. It is a surefire way of gaining reading skills. The great thing about Drama is that one piece of text can be interpreted in infinite ways. You will find new ways to approach analysis because you get to act it out instead of just reading it at a desk. Not to mention, there’s nothing like “have this memorised by next week” that will force you to improve your reading skills fast.
5. You’ll gain a higher appreciation of the written (and spoken) word. Theatre has informed culture all over the world throughout history. Studying it exposes you to many great works of literature and ideas you may not otherwise encounter. Even if you don’t end up pursuing it for the rest of your life, there are few directions in life you can take that haven’t been influenced by the artform.
6. Your memorisation skills will be on point. It’s a lot more than just remembering words and actions. The memorisation tricks you teach yourself, and the way you learn to multitask on stage can inform the ways you study, work, and organize your mind later on in life.

To enrol your child for our speech & drama classes, contact the Betty Ann Norton Theatre School by clicking here