David has taught Honors Physics, AP Physics, IB Physics and general science courses. He has a Masters in Education, and a Bachelors in Physics.
Kids, especially young kids, often lack confidence and self-esteem. Rather than building confidence, classmates can sometimes be detrimental to confidence because of the way they may pick on one another. By completing confidence-building activities at school and having students interact with other kids, this dynamic can be reversed. Here are a few ideas for confidence-building activities appropriate for kids.
There are many types of positive affirmation activities that can have huge benefits for confidence. You can start the process by having students complete a writing prompt answering several questions. Here are a few examples of questions you can use:
After completing this kind of reflection, you can encourage students to build each other's confidence. Have them arrange themselves into a ring. Going around the room, each student should say one positive thing about themselves, and then follow it with one positive thing about the person opposite them in the ring.
This can continue until every student has completed the activity, or it can be extended by having students say something nice about the person to the right of them the last time it was their turn. Not only will this build students' confidence, but it will encourage them to be generous with each other as well and may lead to students increasing each other's confidence more in the future.
Sometimes public speaking is seen as something that only older kids and adults do. However, the problem with this is that by the time you have to do it, it seems especially scary and hard. The way to combat this is to have students gradually build up their public speaking skills over time.
To start this process, have every student in the class come up with a short presentation on a topic of their choice. It can be anything from an educational topic surrounding something they've learned in class recently, to sharing their interest in Pokémon or computers. The presentation should be of a length appropriate for the student's age. Young students might only have a one-paragraph, super-short presentation to give. However, for this activity it's best to keep it relatively short regardless of age, since it will take a lot of time.
Once students have come up with the idea and planned what they're going to say, have them form pairs and give their presentations to each other. Once they're done, have three pairs form a group of six. Once again, they can give their presentations, but this time to the entire group of six. Then two groups of six can form a group of twelve, as yet again students give their presentations. Finally, you can have students give their presentations to the class.
In between each stage, depending on the age of the students, you can have a formal process for feedback. Students must always begin by saying something positive about a presentation, and then follow with a suggestion for improvement. By the time students are done giving presentations to the class, they will have had lots of practice and be more comfortable with it.
Finally, there are extracurricular activities. Practically any extracurricular activity can improve students' confidence. The benefit is twofold: students will get better at a particular skill and have more confidence in their ability to achieve things.
Further, there is an additional impact when an activity involves interacting with others. Playing on a sports team or interacting in any kind of activity can improve students' social skills along with confidence and self-esteem. The more experience they have with these kinds of activities, the easier it can be to exude confidence.
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