In this following article, we will take you through some of the best listening games for adults that you can apply and learn from. Fun Games for Adults. Some of the most effective listening games are those that combine learning through fun activities. This takes the pressure off the learning process and inculcates the skill of listening quite.
This post contains affiliate links for your convenience. View disclosure policy.Listening activities: 7 important ideas for teaching listening skills in the classroom, such as whole body listening, class games, and daily practice ideas.As teachers, we always hope that our students are listening carefully to our lessons and assignment instructions. Unfortunately, we find that sometimes they aren’t paying close attention to what we’re saying and this can affect their learning. This becomes a problem when they miss key information during instruction. It’s a good idea to take some time to explicitly teach listening skills so that students retain more of the information we are giving them.How do we do that? Well, in this post I’m going to share with you 7 strategies for teaching listening skills in the classroom.These 7 actionable ways to teach listening skills in the classroom will be just the ideas that you need. Your students will gain knowledge of what it looks like and feels like to be an active listener, engaged and responsive to a speaker, and able to complete a task by following directions.
By taking the time to practice good listening skills with your students, I’m sure you will find your job just a little bit easier. 7 Listening Activities that Promote Attentiveness in the Classroom 1. Model Good Listening StrategiesIn front of the classroom, play a short game of Simon Says with one child volunteering to be “Simon” and you are the game player. Model good listening strategies such as looking the speaker in the eye, repeating the directions to yourself (aloud so they can hear you), not starting until you’ve heard all the instructions (say aloud, “Ok, he’s finished giving me the instructions so now I may begin”), and speak aloud what you’re going to do as if you were picturing it in your mind before doing it. After “Simon” gives you a few short instructions, ask the class to tell you what they witnessed you did well. Write their answers in a thinking map on the board.are another great opportunity to model and practice listening skills. The class sits together in the circle and takes turns sharing their thoughts and feelings on the topic being discussed.
Children are encouraged to look at the speaker and listen to what they say.2. Partner ConversationsPair children up and give them a general discussion topic.
Each child takes turns being the speaker or the listener. When the speaker is finished speaking, have the listener repeat one of the speaker’s main points, and offer them a compliment. Having “Think, Pair, Shares” during lessons and discussions is a great way to practice receiving and sharing what is heard.3. Teach “Whole Body Listening”A much-used concept in the early primary grades is “whole body listening.” In whole body listening, a student practices keeping particular key parts of their body focused on the speaker. Their eyes are watching, ears are listening, brain is focused on the speaker’s information, mouth is closed, shoulders are squared toward the speaker, heart is caring about the message, hands are folded or in lap, feet are still on the floor.In other words, they are actively “listening” with their entire bodies. Teach your whole class this concept and practice it as a group, before expecting them to put it into practice.
I use this book, to teach this concept. More go-to books for reinforcing listening skills are, and.You can grab a fantastic from Erica Bohrer to help teach your students this important skill. Daily Listening ActivitiesOne way to see a marked improvement in your students’ listening skills is to give them short, daily skills practice.
Any daily practice should be fun, and practical. In this case, the skills should include encouraging kids to focus on oral instructions, visualizing the tasks given, and completing them accurately. Give them short instructions verbally for completing a task, or two or three tasks in succession (depending on their age/cognitive development), and have them practice listening and completing the tasks without repeating the instructions.One idea for this activity is to have them pull out a blank sheet of paper and give them instructions. For example, “Draw a large brown oval in the center of your paper.
Add an orange letter V in the center. Use a black crayon to draw two large circles, side by side, above the V” (and they end up with a basic sketch of an owl on their paper that they can finish drawing details and color on their own). Want some pre-made activities for daily practice such as this? Try my HUGE assortment of.5. The Storytelling Listening GameIn this game, you start a story with a beginning phrase, and then each child in the classroom adds one word to the story in turn.
Students must be active participants and follow the story closely so that when their time comes to add a word, the story will make sense. Another way to practice this is by playing a traditional game of Telephone where a message is passed around the room to see if it stays the same. Storytelling PodsSort children into groups of three. In these “pods,” they are to play the storytelling game, only in successive story events rather than one word. For example, the first student starts with an event such as “The rabbit found a carrot in the garden.” Then the second student adds an event that happens afterward in the story, such as “The carrot was too big to carry.” The third student adds, “So the rabbit put it in a wagon to pull it to his burrow.” After the time is given for the pods to come up with their three-event stories, instruct the students to move to a new pod.
In those groups, they must retell their stories with perfect accuracy to their new pod members. 20 Questions Listening GameIn this classic game, lots of listening skills are practiced without even explicitly calling it a “lesson in listening skills”. Play this game any time you feel you need subject review, and practicing listening skills at the same time! For instance, tell the class you are an item that starts with a certain letter, a fictional character, or a Science object you’ve recently learned about. Have them ask you to try to figure out what you are.Listening Activities and Resources for Teachers Listening MatsPractice and building listening skills year-round with.
Students must listen, visualize, and think what is read and complete the appropriate task on the mat (picture) provided. They will build listening and reading skills through repeated practice.There are 20 different are included for each month. There are 3 variations of these printable activity mats included. Every mat covers a different topic or theme.
Each type of mat covers and builds different listening skills and following instructions.FREE Listening ActivitiesDownload the FREE printable Listening Mats today by clicking the image below. These activities will help teach kids to focus on oral instructions, visualize the tasks given, and complete tasks accurately.More Listening Activities for KidsPIN for Later.
What Are The 15 Fun Public Speaking Activities?I truly believe that making public speaking fun is one of the things that are going to take an average public speaker and give then enough practice to turn them into a good or great public speaker. My Friend’s Fictional LifeIn this activity, what you do is you get up in front of people (you can do it home by yourself as well) and you take one of your friends and you introduce them. However, instead of introducing them in the normal way you make up a fictional life for them.So you say, hi this is Jane Smith, and she actually moonlights as a jazz pianist for the underground mafia. And you talk about her life, whatever it may be.So this is fun because it makes you been creative, it’s very easy to think of these things on the spot and just roll with it. It’s generally pretty funny as well. Impromtu GameYou basically just get up in front of people and somebody gives you something impromptu to run with.It might be a topic, it might be a sentence or it might just be a single word or anything like that.
But generally we run with just a certain topic.For example: They need to talk about climate change or they need to talk about what makes a great teacher, or they need to talk about social media changes or whatever. So that the impromptu game. Funny Image GameThis is similar to the impromptu game, but basically what you do is you give the speaker a funny image; you can find these easily just searching through Google and you get them to talk about that image.You can pretend it’s their life experience and how this impacted my life or they can talk about why this image is important and what this image means or what’s the story behind this image. Continuous StoryThis is best done with a group of people. Each person gets up and might speak for anywhere from 20 seconds to a minute and they start telling a story.And when their time is up, the next person has to get up and they have to continue the story.So, obviously each person doesn’t know what the person before them is going to say and so they have to continue the story.The goal of this is to make the story make sense.
This game helps people engage in listening and learn to be creative enough to make the story continue on and make sense. Something In My WalletYou can use your own wallet or (if people are comfortable enough and happy to do it) you can get the person sitting next to you’s wallet.Take an item out of the wallet and discuss what this item is and why its important and obviously you are trying to elaborate and make it funny as much as possible. Action StoryThis can be done in 2 ways.A) You tell a story that has a whole great of actions in it and as a speaker you have to do these actions yourself whilst speaking.B) Or the audience has to do the actions themselves while the speaker is giving their speech.So you could say; I did a big stretch when I woke up in the morning. And everybody has to stretch. And then you say, I put on my hat, and everybody has to do the actions in line with that. Make A CommercialGet a bunch of things from your room or from your house, bring them in and you need to make a commercial about these items.Someone is giving a random product.
It might be a deodorant, might be an iphone, it could be anything. And then they are required to give a 30 second to 1 minute commercial on this product and talk about why this is so awesome and why people should buy it.
So that’s a really fun one as well. A Fake HolidayThis one is done with images primarily and a set of images that are related to each other.So it could be a farm where you have images of animals, or the barn house or something funny happening on the farm.The speaker is required to tell maybe 1, 2 or 3 sentences for each image and then you click forward to the next image.Then they need to use the next image to continue the story.So you are using these images as the key cards, as to where the story needs to go so the person needs to adapt the story based on the images that are given. Alternative EndingYou take a well known TV show or a well-known movie.
And what you do is you create an alternative ending for it. Connect The NounsThis is really a fun one, I really like this one.You can do this by either putting nouns on key cards shuffling them up and picking 2 up at a time or you can use this.You get 2 nouns and you then have to create a story that connects that 2 nouns.So it might be ‘a sheep’ and ‘a mechanic’ or it could be ‘friend’ and ‘shoelace’.Then you have to create a story that connects those 2 nouns together. How It Got It’s NameTake an item (for example: packing tape) and you need to create a story around a packing tape and why it’s got its name that way.You have to make it exciting. Oink SubstitutionWhen you are giving a speech you must allocate one word that you have to replace with word ‘oink’. Or you can use ‘moo’ or you use ‘woof’ or whatever it is that you want.So you can use the word ‘I’ and replace it with ‘oink’.So you would say: “Oink went to the movies and oink bought some popcorn.” And so you replace that word ‘I’ with ‘oink’.This challenges your mind, and it makes that little bit harder to deliver a presentation. And it’s pretty funny for the audience, as well.
Which Is A Lie?This one is generally pretty easy to out work and a lot of fun as well. And you will find that some students do it really well, but then some students just fumble when they are tying to lie and its quiet humorous to watch.A person gets up and tells 3 truths about themselves, but 2 of them need to be true and one of them needs to be a lie.So they get up and they tell 3 things about themselves and then the audience needs to choose which one was a lie and they see if they were correct.So this one is really quick, really easy and you don’t have to go into a great detail about it but it can be really fun. DefinitionsGet really big words that nobody really knows what the meaning is. You can do this using or another tool (just Google it). Or you can just go through the dictionary and pick some strange ones yourself.The speaker has to get up – they are given this strange word and they need to with confidence tell the class what this word means.Obviously they are making it up, but they need to do it confidently. EndingsYou give a person an ending.
It could be a saying: “Diamonds are forever” or an ending to a story ‘and the man cried for 3 days’.You give them an ending and they have to create a story that matches up with that ending.A lot of being a great pubic speaking is about story telling. Teaching people how to creatively think up stories on the spot is going to make them a better public speaker.I have previously talked about. We need to continually practicing public speaking (like riding a bike) and have it be fun if we want to. Technique comes along with that.So keep that in mind, keep public speaking fun and I hope that you enjoyed these activities.