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Techniques to improve the four skills in the class:
Listening skill: 1. MODEL STRATEGIES
GOOD
LISTENING
In 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. Classroom meetings 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 CONVERSATIONS Pair 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”
2 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, Whole Body Listening Larry at School by Elizabeth Sautter, to teach this concept. More go-to books for reinforcing listening skills are Listen, Buddy, Listen and Learn, and My Mouth is a Volcano. 4. DAILY SKILL PRACTICE One 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 Listening Mats, perfect for any time of the year. 5. THE STORYTELLING GAME In 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. 6. STORYTELLING PODS Sort 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
3 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 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.
7. QUESTIONS In 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 20 yes/no questions to try to figure out what you are. 8. INTERPERSONAL ACTIVITIES One effective and nonthreatening way for students to develop stronger listening skills is through interpersonal activities, such as mock interviews and storytelling. Assign the students to small groups of two or three, and then give them a particular listening activity to accomplish. For example, you may have one student interview another for a job with a company or for an article in a newspaper. Even a storytelling activity, such as one that answers the question "What was your favorite movie from last year?" can give students the opportunity to ask one another questions and then to practice active listening skills. 9. GROUP ACTIVITIES Larger group activities also serve as a helpful method for teaching listening skills to students. You can begin with a simple group activity. For the first part, divide students into groups of five or larger and instruct them to learn one hobby or interest of at least two other group members. Encourage them to ask clarifying questions during the activity, and you may allow them to take notes if helpful. However, as time passes and their skills grow, you should limit students to only writing notes after the completion of the first part of the group activity. For the second part, have the students sit in a large circle, and then have each individual student share the name and the hobby or interest of the group members that she or he met. This second part of the group activity can also lend itself to additional listening exercises. For example, you may ask students to name a number of the hobbies and interests identified during the sharing session.
4 10. AUDIO SEGMENTS You can also teach listening skills through audio segments of radio programs, online podcasts, instructional lectures and other audio messages. You should model this interactive listening process in class with your students, and then instruct them to repeat the exercise on their own. First, instruct students to prepare for listening by considering anything that they will want to learn from the content of the audio segment. Once they have written down or shared these ideas, then play the audio segment, allowing the students to take notes if helpful. Once they have gained confidence and experience, repeat this activity but instruct students to not take notes until the completion of the audio segment. You can use shorter or longer audio segments, and you can choose more accessible or more challenging material for this type of exercise. 11. VIDEO SEGMENTS Another helpful resource for teaching listening skills are video segments, including short sketches, news programs, documentary films, interview segments, and dramatic and comedic material. As with audio segments, select the portion and length of the video segment based on the skill level of your students. With your students, first watch the segment without any sound and discuss it together. Encourage the students to identify what they think will be the content of the segment. Then, watch the segment again, this time with sound, allowing students to take notes if helpful for their skill level. After the completion of the video segment, you can have students write a brief summary of the segment, or you can take time to discuss as a group how the segment compares with the students' expectations.
Speaking skill: Strategies for Developing Speaking Skills Students often think that the ability to speak a language is the product of language learning, but speaking is also a crucial part of the language learning process. Effective instructors teach students speaking strategies -- using minimal responses, recognizing scripts, and using language to talk about language -- that they can use to help themselves expand their knowledge of the language and their confidence in using it. These instructors help students learn to speak so that the students can use speaking to learn.
5 1. Using minimal responses Language learners who lack confidence in their ability to participate successfully in oral interaction often listen in silence while others do the talking. One way to encourage such learners to begin to participate is to help them build up a stock of minimal responses that they can use in different types of exchanges. Such responses can be especially useful for beginners. Minimal responses are predictable, often idiomatic phrases that conversation participants use to indicate understanding, agreement, doubt, and other responses to what another speaker is saying. Having a stock of such responses enables a learner to focus on what the other participant is saying, without having to simultaneously plan a response. 2. Recognizing scripts Some communication situations are associated with a predictable set of spoken exchanges -- a script. Greetings, apologies, compliments, invitations, and other functions that are influenced by social and cultural norms often follow patterns or scripts. So do the transactional exchanges involved in activities such as obtaining information and making a purchase. In these scripts, the relationship between a speaker's turn and the one that follows it can often be anticipated. Instructors can help students develop speaking ability by making them aware of the scripts for different situations so that they can predict what they will hear and what they will need to say in response. Through interactive activities, instructors can give students practice in managing and varying the language that different scripts contain. 3. Using language to talk about language Language learners are often too embarrassed or shy to say anything when they do not understand another speaker or when they realize that a conversation partner has not understood them. Instructors can help students overcome this reticence by assuring them that misunderstanding and the need for clarification can occur in any type of interaction, whatever the participants' language skill levels. Instructors can also give students strategies and phrases to use for clarification and comprehension check.
6 By encouraging students to use clarification phrases in class when misunderstanding occurs, and by responding positively when they do, instructors can create an authentic practice environment within the classroom itself. As they develop control of various clarification strategies, students will gain confidence in their ability to manage the various communication situations that they may encounter outside the classroom. 4. Use picture prompts Depending on the variety of visual resources and class level and ability, a teacher can brainstorm with the class a variety of sentences, (key) words, and phrases around a particular category or situational context that is the building block for a presentation. 5. Follow-up With a memory game or exercise. Students then work in pairs writing down or translating the words they remember. 6. Face Game If your students do not know already then first teach them the following parts of the face: forehead, chin, ear, eye, nose, mouth. Now, ask the students to make fists with both hands and touch their ears. On the first round, you play the role of the leader and say: ear, ear, ear – forehead (or a different part of the face from the list above). The third time that you say ear, say it more slowly, so that other players know that you are about to switch. When the new part is called out (in this example, forehead), everyone must quickly move both of their fists from ear to forehead at the same time. If anyone, including the leader, touches any part of the face other than the forehead is the loser and takes over as the new leader. As punishment, the loser must share their views on any subject of your choosing with the class. 7. Fast Food Role Play This role-playing exercise requires two students. Ask for volunteers or select from the class. One student will act as the manager of a fast food restaurant. The other will act as a student looking for a part-time job. The restaurant has advertised a part-time vacancy, so the student has come for an interview. The two should try to develop a lively yet formal conversation of the job duties, employee benefits, and the student’s qualifications and experience before the manager reaches his/her decision. Some useful supplementary vocabulary includes: wages, salary, personality, official duties, and position in a job.
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8. Travel Agency Role Play This role-playing exercise requires two students. Ask for volunteers or select from the class. One student will act as an agent in a travel agency. The other student will act as a customer. The customer wants to take a trip to Australia for two weeks and asks for help from the agent about the travel route, airplane tickets, hotel rooms, places of interest, etc. The students should try to keep the conversation lively. Some useful supplementary vocabulary includes: peak season, airlines, double room, single room, economy, first class, one way ticket, and roundtrip. 9. TV Discussion Panel Role Play This role-playing exercise requires any number of students. Ask for volunteers or select from the class. Each student will select and play the role of a current or historical political figure such as: Barack Obama, Abraham Lincoln, the Dalai Lama, John Lennon, Arnold Schwarzenegger, etc. You will acts as the host of a TV discussion panel in which each of the famous political personalities participate. Begin the discussion by asking one of the students what they think about the future of America. After the first student has answered, each of the other students can give their opinions. The students should try to enliven their answers by using the person’s typical mannerisms and accent if possible. Some useful supplementary vocabulary includes: improve, capitalism, free market economy, thoughts, peace, and get along with one another. 10. Guessing Game
8 Using vocabulary the students have learned recently, prepare some cards with one word written on them. During class, select one of the cards without showing the students what is written on it. The students will try to figure out what the word is by asking questions, which you will answer. They may only ask “yes-no” or “choice type” questions such as: is it something you can eat? Is it made out of paper? Is it a thing or a person? Is it an animal? Can it move? Is it something we can use? The students can guess what is written on the card whenever they think they have enough information. Anyone who guesses right wins a piece of candy or another reward provided by you. Then go to the next card.
Reading skill: What Is Reading Fluency?
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Reading fluency is the ability to read quickly and accurately. Once you are fluent in reading, you are able to focus on what the text means rather than trying to decode words. Five Minutes to Better Reading Skills helps you become a fluent reader in 5 minutes a day with short reading drills. There has been an independent 5-year study showing the substantial gains using it.
1. Book Activities for Grades 3-5
Book reports are a thing of the past, it's time to be innovative and try some book activities that your students will enjoy. These activities will reinforce and enhance what your students are currently reading. Try a few, or try them all. They can also be repeated throughout the year. Here you will learn 20 classroom activities that complement the books that students are reading. 2. Reading Motivation Strategies and Activities
Looking for ideas on how to boost your students reading motivation? Try to focus on activities that spark your students interest and help increase their their selfesteem. Research confirms that a child's motivation is the key factor in successful reading. You may have noticed students in your classroom who are struggling readers, tend to have a lack of motivation and do not like to partake in book-related activities. These students may have trouble selecting appropriate texts, and therefore do not like to read for pleasure. Here are five ideas and activities to increase your students reading motivation and encourage them to get into books. 3. Reading Strategies for Elementary Students
Studies show that children need to practice reading everyday in order to improve their reading skills. Developing and teaching reading strategies to elementary students will help increase their reading ability. Often when students get stuck on a word they are told to "sound it out." While this strategy may work at times, there are other strategies that may work even better. The following is a list of reading strategies for elementary students. Teach your students these tips to help improve their reading ability. 4. Reading Activity Calendar
10 Here is a complied list that you can pick and choose to add to your reading activity calendar. Browse through the list and choose the ones you like. The activities are in no special order, and can be placed on your calendar on any given day. Here are a few examples of what your will learn, how to write a letter of appreciation to an author and mail it to them, have your friends/classmates dress up like the characters from your favorite book, create a word game and make a list of words to describe something you love, make a list of the longest words that you know, make a list of your top 10 favorite things. 5. Read-Alouds A good read-aloud captures the listeners attention, keeps them engaged, and is embedded in your memory for years. Reading aloud to your students is an excellent way to prepare them for success in school, and not to mention, is usually a favorite activity in the classroom. Here is a quick guide all about read-alouds. 6. Teaching the Analytic Method of Phonics
Are you looking for ideas for teaching phonics to your elementary students? The analytic method is a simple approach that has been around for nearly one hundred years. Here is a quick resource for you to learn about the method, and how to teach it. Here you will learn the benefits, how to teach the method, and tips for success. 7. Repeated Reading Strategy
The repeated reading strategy is designed for students to be able to feel confident while reading. Its main goal is to help children be able to read accurately, effortlessly and at an appropriate rate. In this guide you will learn the description and purpose of this strategy, along with the procedure and example activities. 1. Use the shared events of students' lives to inspire writing. Debbie Rotkow, a co-director of the Coastal Georgia Writing Project, makes use of the real-life circumstances of her first grade students to help them compose writing that, in Frank Smith's words, is "natural and purposeful." When a child comes to school with a fresh haircut or a tattered book bag, these events can inspire a poem. When Michael rode his bike without training wheels for the first time, this occasion provided a worthwhile topic to write about. A new baby in a family, a lost tooth, and the death of one student's father were the playful or serious inspirations for student writing.
11 Says Rotkow: "Our classroom reverberated with the stories of our lives as we wrote, talked, and reflected about who we were, what we did, what we thought, and how we thought about it. We became a community." 2. Establish an email dialogue between students from different schools who are reading the same book. When high school teacher Karen Murar and college instructor Elaine Ware, teacher-consultants with the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project, discovered students were scheduled to read the August Wilson play Fences at the same time, they set up email communication between students to allow some "teacherless talk" about the text. Rather than typical teacher-led discussion, the project fostered independent conversation between students. Formal classroom discussion of the play did not occur until students had completed all email correspondence. Though teachers were not involved in student online dialogues, the conversations evidenced the same reading strategies promoted in teacher-led discussion, including predication, clarification, interpretation, and others. 3. Use writing to improve relations among students. Diane Waff, co-director of the Philadelphia Writing Project, taught in an urban school where boys outnumbered girls four to one in her classroom. The situation left girls feeling overwhelmed, according to Waff, and their "voices faded into the background, overpowered by more aggressive male voices." Determined not to ignore this unhealthy situation, Waff urged students to face the problem head-on, asking them to write about gender-based problems in their journals. She then introduced literature that considered relationships between the sexes, focusing on themes of romance, love, and marriage. Students wrote in response to works as diverse as de Maupassant's "The Necklace" and Dean Myers's Motown and DiDi. In the beginning there was a great dissonance between male and female responses. According to Waff, "Girls focused on feelings; boys focused on sex, money, and the fleeting nature of romantic attachment." But as the students continued to write about and discuss their honest feelings, they began to notice that they had similar ideas on many issues. "By confronting these gender-based problems directly," says Waff, "the effect was to improve the lives of individual students and the social well-being of the wider school community." 4. Help student writers draw rich chunks of writing from endless sprawl.
12 Jan Matsuoka, a teacher-consultant with the Bay Area Writing Project (California), describes a revision conference she held with a third grade English language learner named Sandee, who had written about a recent trip to Los Angeles. "I told her I wanted her story to have more focus," writes Matsuoka. "I could tell she was confused so I made rough sketches representing the events of her trip. I made a small frame out of a piece of paper and placed it down on one of her drawings — a sketch she had made of a visit with her grandmother." "Focus, I told her, means writing about the memorable details of the visit with your grandmother, not everything else you did on the trip." "'Oh, I get it,' Sandee smiled, 'like just one cartoon, not a whole bunch.'" Sandee's next draft was more deep than broad. 5. Work with words relevant to students' lives to help them build vocabulary. Eileen Simmons, a teacher-consultant with the Oklahoma State University Writing Project, knows that the more relevant new words are to students' lives, the more likely they are to take hold. In her high school classroom, she uses a form of the children's ABC book as a community-building project. For each letter of the alphabet, the students find an appropriately descriptive word for themselves. Students elaborate on the word by writing sentences and creating an illustration. In the process, they make extensive use of the dictionary and thesaurus. One student describes her personality as sometimes "caustic," illustrating the word with a photograph of a burning car in a war zone. Her caption explains that she understands the hurt her "burning" sarcastic remarks can generate. 6. Help students analyze text by asking them to imagine dialogue between authors. John Levine, a teacher-consultant with the Bay Area Writing Project (California), helps his college freshmen integrate the ideas of several writers into a single analytical essay by asking them to create a dialogue among those writers. He tells his students, for instance, "imagine you are the moderator of a panel discussion on the topic these writers are discussing. Consider the three writers and construct a dialogue among the four 'voices' (the three essayists plus you)." Levine tells students to format the dialogue as though it were a script. The essay follows from this preparation.
13 7. Spotlight language and use group brainstorming to help students create poetry. The following is a group poem created by second grade students of Michelle Fleer, a teacher-consultant with the Dakota Writing Project (South Dakota). Underwater Crabs crawl patiently along the searching for Fish soundlessly weave their slippery Whales whisper to others as through the salty And silent waves wash into a where an octopus is sleeping.
ocean way they dark
floor prey. through seaweed slide water. cave
Fleer helped her students get started by finding a familiar topic. (In this case her students had been studying sea life.) She asked them to brainstorm language related to the sea, allowing them time to list appropriate nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The students then used these words to create phrases and used the phrases to produce the poem itself. As a group, students put together words in ways Fleer didn't believe many of them could have done if they were working on their own, and after creating several group poems, some students felt confident enough to work alone. 8. Ask students to reflect on and write about their writing. Douglas James Joyce, a teacher-consultant with the Denver Writing Project, makes use of what he calls "metawriting" in his college writing classes. He sees metawriting (writing about writing) as a way to help students reduce errors in their academic prose. Joyce explains one metawriting strategy: After reading each essay, he selects one error that occurs frequently in a student's work and points out each instance in which the error is made. He instructs the student to write a one page essay, comparing and contrasting three sources that provide guidance on the established use of that particular convention, making sure a variety of sources are available. "I want the student to dig into the topic as deeply as necessary, to come away with a thorough understanding of the how and why of the usage, and to understand any debate that may surround the particular usage." 9. Ease into writing workshops by presenting yourself as a model.
14 Glorianne Bradshaw, a teacher-consultant with the Red River Valley Writing Project (North Dakota), decided to make use of experiences from her own life when teaching her first-graders how to write. For example, on an overhead transparency she shows a sketch of herself stirring cookie batter while on vacation. She writes the phrase "made cookies" under the sketch. Then she asks students to help her write a sentence about this. She writes the words who, where, and when. Using these words as prompts, she and the students construct the sentence, "I made cookies in the kitchen in the morning." Next, each student returns to the sketch he or she has made of a summer vacation activity and, with her help, answers the same questions answered for Bradshaw's drawing. Then she asks them, "Tell me more. Do the cookies have chocolate chips? Does the pizza have pepperoni?" These facts lead to other sentences. Rather than taking away creativity, Bradshaw believes this kind of structure gives students a helpful format for creativity. 10. Get students to focus on their writing by holding off on grading. Stephanie Wilder found that the grades she gave her high school students were getting in the way of their progress. The weaker students stopped trying. Other students relied on grades as the only standard by which they judged their own work. "I decided to postpone my grading until the portfolios, which contained a selection of student work, were complete," Wilder says. She continued to comment on papers, encourage revision, and urge students to meet with her for conferences. But she waited to grade the papers. It took a while for students to stop leafing to the ends of their papers in search of a grade, and there was some grumbling from students who had always received excellent grades. But she believes that because she was less quick to judge their work, students were better able to evaluate their efforts themselves.