Tongue twisters to help with public speaking

🤔 Did you know? Tongue twisters can help kids overcome mumbling, speak more clearly & perfect pronunciation. This can enable them to become more confident speakers. Plus tongue twisters are fun to say, which can also help calm nerves!

The trick with tongue twisters - at least when it comes to using them to improve speaking - is to focus on each syllable and word while repeating the tongue twister 3 or 4 times.

Here are some of our favourites.

Starting small (but still not easy):

• • Toy boat
  • Three free throws
  • Are our oars oak?

Getting bigger:

• • Mrs. Smith's Fish Sauce Shop
  • Six sick slick slim sycamore saplings
  • Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
  • How can a clam cram in a clean cream can?
  • Can you can a can as a canner can can a can?

Adding more difficulty:

• • If two witches would watch two watches, which witch would watch which watch?
  • Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear. Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair. Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn't very fuzzy, was he?

And for those who are up for the challenge... 😜

• • Betty Botter had some butter, “But,” she said, “this butter's bitter. If I bake this bitter butter, it would make my batter bitter. But a bit of better butter – that would make my batter better.”
  • So she bought a bit of butter, better than her bitter butter, and she baked it in her batter, and the batter was not bitter. So 'twas better Betty Botter bought a bit of better butter.

TIP!

Beyond tongue twisters, reading aloud can greatly help with annunciation and self-expression. For example, you can use fables, historic speeches and poetry. If you have our Say What? cards, you have 73 snippets of dialogue at your fingertips that offer plenty of practice.