listening sticks

With all the children we teach we want to encourage them to develop their listening skills. I have devised a game that encourages competition and challenge with a very simple resource . The example here is just a stick with numbers and colours on it . The idea is that each person listens for a colour to be called out that they have on their stick . They should wave the stick if they have the colour.  The teacher calls a number and the children wave their sticks if they have that number . the teacher then calls a number in specific colour and only the children with that number printed in the specific colour should wave their sticks . There are six different permutations of sticks by the way - so there will always be more than one child that can respond.There are lots of different ways to play the listening game and you can change the objects etc on the sticks . It's simple and fun and encourages the learner to listen for specific information . The game can then be played by groups of children independently - with one child being the leader calling out the colours / numbers etc .
Here is a PDF to help you use this idea in your own teaching and  learning.

Listening_sticks.PDF

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1iAdGh-iS6qcEpoMUlvdzdwN2M/edit?usp=sharing 
 

Talking animals

Over the course of an academic year I create and explore ways to deliver effective language teaching and learning for local primary schools and KS3 departments. Now I want to share with the language learning community out there!

So here we go , first blog post coming up!
We are currently teaching year 3 children how to say which animals they like and dislike. This weekend I learned about the Yakit kids app https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/yakit-kids/id794546203?mt=8
and found it really simple to use . 

So after a windy walk on the beach , our dog lay down and looked tired and I thought how much our Y3 children would like to be just like Dr. Dolittle and understand animal language! Quick photo , create a mouth , add a sound file and I have an example to share with colleagues whose classes have IPads and Chrome Books !

Here's my example - bet the children can do better though!