Voice training is vital for producing a clear and correct pronunciation as well as proper articulation of words in English. If we take a look at the mechanism behind voice, all the magic comes out with the air we breathe. When we exhale, the air pushed up by our lungs travels through the windpipe to the voice box which is called larynx. This is where the sound is produced. Therefore, we need to control our breaths to control our voice, for this there are breathing exercises.
In this post we are going to focus on a simple work out plan which you can use for you or your students before delivering a speech or as a vocal warm up activity before a stage play. These are a few simple activities which you can extend using variety of activities according to the group of students or according to the complexity of the activity you are going to do. Let’s do this step by step.
Getting Your Muscles Ready
You can start with a simple massage, start massaging your muscles in the neck by gently squeezing them using your fingers. The neck muscles are located behind and either sides of the neck, start from the top and gently massage them down to the shoulders. You can extend the massage to your shoulder muscles. This activity will ease your pressure and give a warm start to your voice training. If you still do not feel warmed up, you can do some stretching to your body also.
Start Breathing
As we said earlier, all the magic is hidden inside the air we breathe. So, take a deep breath. This is not just an ordinary breath, inhale using both nostrils and mouth. You should fill your lungs as well as your belly like inflating a balloon. Now, you should feel the pressure of air inside your lungs and belly. Slowly release them until you get used to this. Now, are you ready to make some noise? Sure you are. Take a deep breath and release them with a noise by letting your vocal codes to vibrate. You can use a simple sound like ‘ah.’ You can try few variations of releasing the air, starting with slow long sounds and bursting out sounds and releasing sounds using intervals can be such activities.
Extending Breathing Activity
You can bring some systematic activates to the breathing activities like breathing and releasing the voice using English vowel sounds (A,E,I,O,U) as well as you can use western musical notes (DO, RE, MI, FA, SO, LA, TI, DO) When doing the releasing of voice you can start reciting the notes according to ascending to descending or otherwise. These activities will train your sounds which are directly produced through the vocal strings. You can try variations of activities in this phase. If you refer to YouTube, you will find ample resources to do this. Remember, use them with understanding of the purpose of the activity.
Voice is not only produced using the vocal codes, but you need your whole mouth which includes your tongue, teeth, lips and inner parts of the mouth. Let us extend our training to those parts of the mouth. Hope you are ready.
Lips
Wetting lips is always good before speaking, as a warm up you can do simple stretching to your lips by smacking, rolling and curling like you are angry, pointing lips just like fake kissing and moving pointed lips to left and right can be some fun ways of doing this. Vibrate your lips like you make a sound of an engine when you were kids is one of the most common methods of training the lips before speech. This will help you to produce ‘lip words’ like words wit letter ‘p’ properly.
Tongue
For your tongue also you can give a simple warm up like bending and curling. You can give a vibrate to your tongue too. (most kids do this to annoy their friends.) You can produce sounds like ‘L’ and ‘S’ sounds to train your lip. You can make a hissing sound by taking the tip of the tongue between your pair of teeth to train your tip of the tongue. Most Asian students find it difficult to produce ‘S’ ‘P’ and ‘F’ sounds. Warming up your tongue and lips will be a good remedy for this.
Tongue Twisters
Tongue twisters are a good way to practice proper articulation of difficult sounds. Find suitable tongue twisters relevant to the letters which are difficult to be pronounced. For example, to train /s/ sound we can use tongue twisters like: ‘The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain’ and for the sound /f/ you can try: Four furious friends fought for the phone as well as for the sound /w/ we may try the tongue twisters like: Wally wanted water but Wilma wanted whiskey. Try finding more tongue twisters and use them appropriately; this will be fun and the students will actively participate in it without knowing that they are actually practicing something.
After doing vocal warm ups, you can move to next steps of your activity. If it is a speech, you may ask your students to deliver the speech with proper articulation of letters and sounds. If it is a play you can now start practicing dialogues, if it is a choir, can start singing some parts.
These activities can be adapted according to situations, you can extend finding more activities and using your creativity you may develop more fun ways of doing these. You can find enough resources by referring to the videos and posts posted by experts on this field. We just wanted to share some fun activities used by ourselves with our students for speech activities and drama practices.
Hope you find these will be helpful, of course this is not much, you must have better examples in this field, please share them with us to enrich this post. Kindly leave a comment in the comment section. If you find this post is useful for others, please share this using the social sharing buttons below.
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