Teaching our young learners how to listen is a true teaching passion for us. For years, we have felt that for whatever reason, our students have become more and more disengaged from their own learning. Yet, the deeper we dug into our concerns, the more we realized that for whatever reason, many of them truly didn’t know how to listen. So, we made it a point to start purposefully teaching kids the who, how and what of truly good listening skills both in and out of the classroom.
But, let’s be real…It’s not always Unicorn, Fairy Dust, Rainbows Land…We all know the reality is, this isn’t always so easy when teaching little learners. They just talk. A lot. A lot a lot.
We’ve had a lot of success with our Listen Up Activities when we use them consistently, and lately our students have been responding really well to visual reminders. With winter break coming, we kind of need all the reminders we can get right about now!
So, we’ve created a few more visual reminders for the classroom to help them put their best foot ear forward.
The long poster works great for a bold, quick whole body response reminder to get them prepared for learning and listening. We have this hanging permanently in our classroom
We simply point to the parts of our own bodies to match the poster, say the word followed by “listening” and then begin. “Eyes listening. Ears listening. Hands listening”…You get the picture. The LISTEN poster works well with older students too. We’ve also included a smaller sized (4 per page) printable option,which we sometimes use if we need to get up close and personal…AKA at individual desks when they should be listening.
Or sometimes (if all else fails), we sing this song because it’s amazing how putting what you want to say to a tune catches their attention immediately…
We’ve packaged these visual reminders for listening in a free download for you. Enjoy!
We use our visual reminders for listening throughout our school day, but purposeful instruction with them happens during our quick daily Listen Up time.
Our kids love these lessons and strive to be the best listeners they can be. We love these lessons because they are no prep (just copy), grab and go activities. We use them all school year long! They only need crayons, a pencil and a worksheet. You just need the oral directions. There are two differentiated instruction levels, beginning and intermediate for class differentiation and extension. We usually use the beginning, then go back and use the intermediate ~ 2 activities in 1. You can try a few for yourself. Just follow our TpT Store and download yourself a copy for free.
