Extending listening sticks

Extending listening sticks

Last month I shared my simple resource of “Listening Sticks”and how these could be used to encourage children to practise listening andresponding for key information.

Here's the link to my original blog Listening sticks 

You will need a master copy for all the activities where you are the speaker 

Here's a simple colours and numbers listening stick for one child

Since my first simple blog about listening sticks  I have been able to put together a sequence of activitiesthat  help children to progress in their ability to listen andrespond and that can be used along the way be as a simple device to create activities to track progressand to assess individual children’s developing skills .

Moving on and listening for specific words and phrases ……from the very simple activity described in myprevious blog , I have explored using these sticks to listen for specific wordsand phrases – so for example if the objects (for examples the numbers on thelistening stick) are printed in different colours – then we can ask thechildren to listen for two items – a number and a colour . You could not waveyour stick if the colour of the number on your stick did not correspond to theinformation they heard.

Creating a recall listening stick …..Why not ask the childrento create their own listening sticks to challenge children to recall languagefrom prior learning during the year

Listening for key information in longer or more detailed texts  and identifying keylanguage . This activity uses the same simple listening stick bit this timelook at the stick below ….when would you wave your stick if this was the  text you heard ?

"Hello , I am called Paul Green and I am 7  years old.I have one brother and he is 9 years old.He has black hair and blue eyes and loves animals . We have 7 cats and dogs inour house and 1 rabbit ……"

Making a listening stick a writing stick!

Why not encourage the children to write a series of sentencesthemselves  to create a text which has toinclude each of the items on their listening stick !