Hi my name is Jema Perry and welcome to Mooncake, where ESLl teaching is made
easy. If you're new here then you need to know that I make weekly ESL teaching tip
videos to help you improve your English teaching. So if you are teaching ESL
online or abroad make sure you subscribe below and hit that notification bell for
weekly ESL teaching tips. Also real quick, if you are new here say hi in the
comments below and let me know where in the world you're teaching. Listening
skills, we all know that they're important, but why are they important and
how do we help our students to develop them? Well today I'm going to help answer
that question and share three fun games that I hope your students to develop
their listening skills. So without further ado, let's get started. When we
talk about developing listening skills with young learners what we're
actually talking about is phonological awareness. Phonological awareness is
really important because it's the foundation of reading. the more you're
able to develop your students phonological awareness but better that
students are then going to do when they then start a phonics program. But what is
phonological awareness? Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize
and work with the sounds in the spoken language. For our young learners this is
having the ability to rhyme, count-out syllables, and recognize alliteration
Jema, I'm teaching online, how can I work on listening skills? Well let's take a
look at a few games. Nursery rhymes. Nursery rhymes are a fantastic tool for
developing phonological awareness and this is because they involve lots
of rhyming, and well they're lots of fun! Try to incorporate at least one Nursery
Rhyme into your daily class routine, of course using chants and TPR as you do.
Hands on your head Hands on your head, Are you ready? Baa baa
black sheep, have you any wool? Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full. One for the
master, one for the Dame. And one for the little boy who lives down the lane.
Good job! If you're not sure how to use chants and TPR in your classroom,
make sure you check out my video on TPR linked below. Once students
confidently know a nursery rhyme then we can develop those listening skills even
further by changing one or two words within the rhyme. For example ...blue sheep
have you any wool? Besides using these nursery rhymes to help develop students
listening skills, we can also review some previously taught material. For example
tick tock hickory dickory dock the mouse ran up the clock
ah the dog ran up the clock oh the cat ran up the clock. Syllables. Being able
to recognize syllables within a word is another important part of phonological
awareness and there are three steps that we can take to help students recognize
these syllables independently. You can start with some simple repetition games.
Clap out a pattern to students and have them clap that pattern back to you. Are
you ready?
good job good job! Next, clap out the syllables within a
word as you say that word together. Ready... let's try together elephant, elephant
good job! Lastly do you say a word and you ask students to clap out the
syllables within that word all by themselves.
Are you ready? Banan. Good job! Banana banana
good job! Now, obviously these skills take some time to develop and just how
quickly they do develop will depend on the age of your students and how often
they're having class. Try not to rush things and just teach
to the level of your students. Sound Recognition. Even activities as simple as
listening, recognizing, and naming sounds can help students to develop their
phonological awareness. So we can incorporate some listening games into
our class to help with this. A good example of this might be when teaching
farm animals. You can start by teaching the different animal vocabulary and then
later playing an animal sound and having students listen recognize and name the
animal that can hear. Okay are you ready listen, listen what is it?
cow cow cow! However, if you are playing this game with animal sounds try
and use realistic sounds as opposed to the human interpretation of what an
animal sounds like, as you'll find that within every language animals tend to
sound a little different. So there you have it, the importance of listening
skills and three ways in which we can help our students to develop them. If you
like this video then go ahead and hit that like button and comment with the
word helpful in the comments below. If you're looking for more online teaching
tip ideas and make sure you check out some of my other videos right here.
That's it for this video thanks so much for watching. You can find me on Facebook
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